Monday Morning Quarterback Part I
By BOP Staff
July 27, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Kim Hollis: G-Force, that weird rodent movie from Jerry Bruckheimer, opened to $31.7 million. What should Disney take from this result?
Calvin Trager: The money and run?
Tim Briody: Clearly, how could the world have existed all this time without talking guinea pigs?
Josh Spiegel: On the one hand, I'd say Disney should be happy to have had another kids' movie hit number one (as sad as it makes me to see this silliness do well). On the other hand, this is something of a bust. This is the third 3-D kids' movie in the past two months, and the lowest-grossing. Sure, it's about talking guinea pigs, but this movie has been marketed like crazy since the release of Disney/Pixar's Up, and the thing was in 1,600 3-D theaters. $32 million seems almost a little low. Either way, Disney should be happy, but maybe not too happy that its big hit may not hit $300 million because of the guinea pigs.
Jim Van Nest: Having actually seen G-Force...Disney should be laughing all the way to the bank. For them to score the #1 flick of the weekend with THIS...that's something to be pretty happy about.
Jason Lee: How proud the late Walt Disney would have been to see how his legacy of talking rodents has survived unto this day.
Reagen Sulewski: I don't really want to be that guy, but I would like to hear the explanation as for why Tracy Morgan's guinea pig had to be black. Now, having not seen this, I can't comment on how well the executed the idea, but I will say that when I heard about the concept for this, I was prepared to get out the knives. When I finally saw the trailer it was something closer to "well, that could have been worse". There's a reason that Disney has stayed on top with kids' entertainment all these years - they know just the right mix of goofy (and Goofy) to put into a film that will get kids excited and bothering their parents, while at least giving the parents hope they won't be dreading every minute. The addition of 3-D is just the latest gimmick to get there.
Jim Van Nest: The way I looked at Tracy Morgan's guinea pig...he was the demolitions expert. Stereotypically, the demolitions expert is always the cocky, slightly unstable one. Seems to me they just let Morgan do his thing. And since he is (the last time I checked anyway) a black guy, his guinea pig was, for lack of a better word, black.
Kim Hollis: Given that G-Force is the kind of thing that appeals strictly to the kiddie set - causing great pain to the adults forced to take them - it was never going to be on the level of other high-performing 3-D movies. I think Disney should be very pleased with the results so far, though I do temper that with a bit of reservation until we have a better idea of what the budget was.
David Mumpower: Sometimes I feel we get a bit too cynical in our evaluations. If we cut to the core here, this is an unknown property about talking rats. It has earned $31.7 million That's about 70% of what Alvin and the Chipmunks managed and that film had the advantage of 60 years of building the brand. I'm not saying G-Force will go on to make 70% of that film's total domestic take of $217 million, because it won't. That would be $150 million, which is too ambitious here. This does look like a property that will coast to $100 million, however, and that feels like a huge win to me for something whose real selling power will be on home video. This even has franchise potential.
Jason Lee: David, I think there's plenty of reason to be cynical about a franchise starring world-saving, gadget-using, jive-talking, why-does-he-have-to-be-black guinea pigs.
David Mumpower: From a quality perspective as well as an existential "why would a benevolent God allow this..." perspective, sure. From a box office perspective, it's like Jerry Bruckheimer is just taking bar bets about films he can get to make $100 million. "Fey pirates? Easy money! Shallow, small-minded credit card debtor looking for a rich man to save her? No problem! Racially stereotyped rats? You betcha!"
The twist is that they're ugly on the inside.
Kim Hollis: The Ugly Truth, the angry romantic comedy with Katherine Heigl hating/loving Gerard Butler, grossed $27.6 million this weekend. Should Sony be pleased with this result?
Tim Briody: Yes, very and Katherine Heigl has actually established herself as a solid draw after 27 Dresses and this.
Josh Spiegel: Sony should be relatively pleased, I guess, but I'm sure they're hoping for The Ugly Truth to have the same great legs that The Proposal, another successful romantic comedy, is having. I would doubt such legs will sprout, though, not only because of The Proposal still making a fair amount of money at the box office. With Julie & Julia in two weeks and maybe even next week's Funny People getting the date-night crowd, I'm not sure The Ugly Truth will survive as well as Sony would hope. They were probably hoping for the top spot, but $27 million is nothing to ignore.
Jason Lee: Sony's got the third biggest romcom opening year-to-date, coming just under the much-better and higher-star-power debut of He's Just Not That Into You. For what looked like a tired, cliche of a romcom, I think this movie could give G-Force come competition for the "We convinced moviegoers to shell out for schlock" award for the weekend.
Reagen Sulewski: Well exactly, Jason. How is this less offensive to people's sensibilities than jive-talking rodents? At least they're pretending it's fantasy. Not to be lost in this is that this is Heigl's third straight high-20s opening weekend, which is extraordinarily difficult for a female lead. This is almost Julia Roberts territory, and I think we'd be talking about her in that tone a lot more were it not obvious that she's kind of an awful person.
Kim Hollis: They should be thrilled. The Ugly Truth is a rote-looking movie with savage reviews and it still managed to sucker $27 million worth of humans to go see it. I keep rooting for Katherine Heigl to fail and she keeps not doing it. I can only presume that her next logical career step is to do a romantic comedy with my nemesis Matthew McConaughey.
David Mumpower: Having been born with boy parts, I'm not the least bit familiar with Heigl's character on Grey's Anatomy. Frankly, I know her best from Roswell. I find myself wondering how lovable Heigl must be on Grey's that she can act like one of the bitchiest people in the history of entertainment, a hotly contested title, yet a certain segment of women still blindly support her no matter what she does. She's in the process of having an Ashley Judd, maybe even a Sandra Bullock type of career, and I don't know *anyone* who likes her as a person. Does she run a dog shelter and nurse indigent orphans on Grey's or what? As for this result, I think it's one of the least surprising of the summer to date. This is almost to the dime what I had projected the film to make six months ago. The fact that it's managed this result with some of the worst reviews this side of The Happening is all the more impressive to me. I think she could star *as* Michael Vick in The Michael Vick Story and it would still make about this much money if they gave her a romantic lead like Bradley Cooper for the tender prison cell scenes. That role would also require less acting from her than normal in spite of the sex change issues.