Box: Office - Ghostly Christmas

One of my favorite traditions when I was a kid and later a visiting adult was picking the movie to watch on Christmas day with the family. It was usually me making the final decision since I was the one forcing keeping the tradition alive. My favorite of these as an adult was Titanic (1997) because even my Dad loved it and he never loves movies. This Christmas evening movie-going tradition maybe isn't as strong as it once was with American families since the weekend didn't jingle merrily with box office change.

Nevertheless, it was definitely crowded with new releases, week old releases and all of those frustratingly shy Oscar hopefuls who refuse to go wide enough for audiences to enjoy them. The weekend was won by Ghostocol which you could categorize as a big hit were it not for that super-sized budget. Whose idea was it to give it a budget that was even higher than the domestic gross of its predecessor five years ago?

Box Office Top Fifteen (Estimates)
          ~ over 2000 theaters
01 MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - GHOST PROTOCOL  $29.5  (cum. $61.9)
02 SHERLOCK HOMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS $20.2  (cum. $79)
03 THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO  $12.7 (cum. $21.1) 
04 ALVIN & THE CHIPMUNKS: CHIPWRECKED $12.6 (cum. $49.5)
05 THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN $9.7 (cum. $17.7)
06 WE BOUGHT A ZOO  $9.4 christmas day only
07 WAR HORSE $7.5 christmas day only [STAGE VS. SCREEN]
08 NEW YEARS EVE $4.9 (cum. $34.2)
09 THE DARKEST HOUR $3 christmas day only 
         ~ under 2000 theaters
10 THE MUPPETS $2.1 (cum. $75.7)
11 THE DESCENDANTS $2.1 (cum. $32.3) 
12 ARTHUR CHRISTMAS $2.1 (cum. $43.5)
13 HUGO $2 (cum. $43.6)
14 THE SITTER $1.8 (cum. $22.3)
15 YOUNG ADULT $1.7 (cum. $7.1)

Talking Points
Pina, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy had the best per screen averages. I was at a Christmas party yesterday and the latter was definitely a movie people were talking about. The conversation frequently swerved to Benedict Cumberbatch (People knew him as the other new Sherlock Holmes -- the not Robert Downey Jr Holmes) and there were at least a couple of "I didn't understand what was going on!"s uttered. But the point is that people are interested in it. They should've opened wider. 

You could finally give the gift of Marilyn. But did the wide release come two weeks too late?Same goes for My Week With Marilyn. It doubled its screen count, finally going wide this weekend for the holiday, but the widening came too late. The movie's moment, if you will, was definitely back around Thanksgiving time when competition was slightly less severe and it had that new girl sparkle in a weekend that was otherwise all about the little kiddies. Now it's competing with other adult appeal movies and it's not entirely fresh news in our fast-paced pop culture. The big expansion five weeks later saw dwindling revenues and it landed on the worst opening weekend chart. Did they not think Marilyn was a brand? Movies are obsessed with selling us the familiar and there's no way that MARILYN didn't have enough branding to open wider earlier. It isn't a French film without dialogue with no stars, after all.

Did you hit the theater and does your family always do this on Christmas?

top o' the linkin' to ya

Sydney Morning Herald production halted on The Great Gatbsy (briefly). Baz Luhrman hit on head just before Christmas. Ouch.
Listen Eggroll Mike D'Angelo's Christmas movie viewing history. Hee.
Rope of Silicon on that revolving director chair for Thor 2. What will it mean for the movie?
Indie Wire Ninety-seven Original Scores that are eligible for Oscar this year. Only five can be nominated of course. A notable omission is Alexandre Desplat's work on The Tree of Life but we figured that would get disqualified due to the abundance of non-original music in the film. As Hans Zimmer promised, he did not submit his wonderful Rango score. (sigh)

Coming Soon Charlize Theron discusses her role in Prometheus
Wider Screenings [NSFW]  in terms of budget to profit ratio the most successful film of all time is... Deep Throat.
Horror Asylum the Whedon-less reboot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is apparently dead. Yay!
Scene Stealers Trey Hoch really hates War Horse. He's not playing around with the hate.
The Wrap finds a silver lining in some not-so-great 2011's fare: good characters in forgettable movies.
THR Scott Feinberg's top ten. 
Hollywood Elsewhere on the strange omen of movie poster defacement in NYC, Mark Wahlberg's Contraband in this case. I also believe in this theory. The more a poster is defaced the more angry or irritated people are with its star or existence for any number of reasons.
Guardian has a Q&A with Samuel L Jackson. His greatest fear is "not working" which explains a lot about his film choices! 

Whether You've Been Naughty... Or Nice...

Happy Holidays from The Film Experience! Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, New Year... whatever you're celebrating.

But most of all... Happy Moviegoing.

Blogging will resume on Monday morning. Coming next week: Interviews with Corey Stoll, Charlize Theron and Jessica Chastain. Plus: more on War Horse, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Iron Lady, and The Artist. And Nathaniel's Top Ten List and the Film Bitch Awards Kick Off.

You'll stick around, right?

'War Horse': Stage vs. Screen

Kurt here. I am not, by any stretch, an authority on theater, and it's only recently that I've been able to collect a good number of playbills. But I can say, without hesitation, that the Broadway production of War Horse is the best thing I've ever witnessed on stage. I saw the show last Sunday, three days before I caught Spielberg's big-screen translation. In technical terms, the play is flawless, so staggeringly well-executed that, at intermission, my partner and I just gave each other wide-eyed, open-mouthed looks. The story, as expected, is one of very typical structure, with a found-and-lost-and-found-again relationship between and adolescent boy (Albert) and an almost preternatural stallion (Joey). But the stagecraft, while clearly taking some inspiration from Julie Taymor's The Lion King (and, perhaps, the Daniel Radcliffe incarnation of Equus), feels wildly extraordinary, at once awesome and minimalistic in its design.

I've decided that what makes the play so potent, beyond its meticulously made yet intentionally haggard horse puppets, and its ripped-from-the-pages-of-history projection screen of a backdrop, is its fierce, unannounced insistence on getting in your space, nearly assaulting you when it's time for stagehands to hurriedly crisscross the performance space with barbed wire, line the aisles with pennant strings to prep for a recruitment scene, or pilot a massive, makeshift tank across an implied, strobe-lit battlefield (another highlight is an ultra-stylized, oversized bullet that's carried from the crowd and spun like a drillbit before striking a key character on stage).

And how does Spielberg's version measure up to all this? I did my best to not allow my first War Horse experience to make me biased against my second, and it's true that the two works are very different beasts. I was, however, keeping score as I basked in the orange glow of Spielberg's impossible skies, for this equine weeper's path to the screen yields a lot of pluses and minuses. Let's take a look (spoiler alert!) at how Spielberg bettered the material, and how he fell short of the merits of its past life.

Peter Mullan and David Thewlis

PLUS: Albert's Father

In the play, Albert's father, Ted Narracott is an irredeemable, profoundly hateable character (seriously, like please-shoot-him-right-now hateable). A drunk and alleged military deserter, he makes a pile of horrid choices—including impulsively selling Joey—and never considers for a moment how they will impact his son...

Fathers, Tradition, Human Animal Bonding after the jump

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Yes, No, Maybe So: "The Hobbit" and "Prometheus"

Just a short time after similarly DRAMATIC (!) black and whiteish teaser posters for the new Batman and Spider-Man movies arrived, posters for the two other 2012 event movies, Prometheus and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey also emerged. Each poster gives us a character's back spotlit as they enter the fantastical of their movie which awaits us too. It's easy to project yourself into the image as you walk into the bright light of... the familiar unknown?

The weird thing about event movies is that they're promoted as if there was only one ONE MOVIE TO RULE THEM ALL but they all seem so interchangeable from a distance. Maybe that's because they're always sequels so the journey we're about to take isn't so unexpected. Even Prometheus is a sequel. Sort of.

The movies all seem interchangable until the trailers arrive to differentiate them. So let's break down Prometheus and The Hobbit after the jump with our "Yes, No, Maybe So" Expectation Management System.

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