Monday Morning Quarterback Lite
By Joel Corcoran
October 30, 2006
BoxOfficeProphets.com
This past weekend saw dreams shattered, dynasties threatened, and a great deal of whining, both at the box office and on the football field. Well, actually all the whining on occurred at Bobby Bowden's press conference after that humiliating loss to the University of Maryland. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Contrary to my fellow Prophets, I saw not a ho-hum, boring weekend of standard expectations, but a collection of deep tremors that shook the pop culture zeitgeist and created spaces for new players to emerge into the spotlight.
Now, I should admit that I am a native son of Nebraska and a true, die-hard Huskers fan (and, yes, I'm still bitter over several bowl games in the 1990s involving teams from Florida). However, Oregon State is a close #2 in that part of my heart reserved for college football. You'll see why this information is relevant as you read on.
Saw III took in $34.3 million during its opening weekend with a per-venue average of almost $11,000. A decent opening, but nothing truly outstanding. The film came up just a couple points shy of an exceptional win, much like the USC Trojans on Saturday.
Like the Trojans in the Pac-10, Saw III is the latest iteration of a franchise that has dominated Halloween films for the past few years. And just like the Trojans, it seems to be getting a little stale and shaky. Unfortunately, there was no other player at the box office like the mighty Oregon State Beavers, so we didn't get to see the film industry equivalent of one of the biggest upsets in my lifetime. To say that the Beavers win on Saturday was "unexpected" would be a gross understatement. This upset victory is on the same scale as Shakespeare in Love beating out Saving Private Ryan for the Best Picture Oscar in 1998 - it's just that stunning. Personally, I place Saturday's USC - OSU game on par with the 1984 Orange Bowl as one of the greatest college football games ever played and one of the most unexpected upsets in history.
I think the team behind Saw III slipped up just a bit, much like the players and coaching staff of the Trojans. They got too complacent and rested on past performance as some expectation of future results. Prior to Saturday, the Trojans had met the Beavers in 69 football games since 1914 with an overall record of 57-8-4. USC's favorite team to play was the Beavers; they had a better overall winning percentage against OSU than any other Pac-10 school. The last time OSU beat USC was in 2000, and that victory came in a gap after 26 straight USC wins from 1968 through 1999 and before USC's dynasty reemerged in 2002. Prior to Saturday, USC had won 27 straight games and had lost in Corvallis only three times in the previous 90 years. The game against OSU should've been a cakewalk.
The original Saw was a breakout hit of 2004. Much like the 2002 USC Trojans (led by Carson Palmer), it lost a few early contests, but later emerged as a powerhouse that spawned a dynasty of imitators. Saw had an $18.3 mil opening on Halloween weekend of 2004, which was about $3.4 mil behind the #1 movie that weekend, The Grudge. But even though it lost in the early season (much like USC losing to Kansas State and Washington State two years earlier), it later dominated the box office and DVD markets. More importantly, it inspired a complete shift in the horror movie genre away from dark and moody remakes of atmospheric Japanese films, like The Ring and The Grudge, and toward a more straightforward type of movie centered around the grisly capture and torture of innocents, like Hostel, The Descent, The Devil's Rejects, and the latest Texas Chainsaw Massacre films.
We can look at Saw II much like the USC Trojans in the Reggie Bush/Matt Leinart era. It was a powerhouse that emerged from a group of talented people after a shaky beginning. Saw II opened October 28th - 30th last year and crushed every horror film released that year. But the Saw franchise has faded since last year in the same way that the Trojans are fading now. Unfortunately, no other movie at the box office could come up the equivalent of OSU's Jeff Van Orsow, the defensive lineman who batted down USC's pass on a 2-point conversion attempt in the last seconds of the game, so Saw III continued the franchise's winning streak by beating out The Departed ($9.8 million), The Prestige ($9.6 million), and Flags of Our Fathers ($6.4 million).
Catch a Fire opened with a titch over $2 mil with a per-venue average of $1,541. The only weekend performance more uninspired than this was the San Francisco 49ers defense.
This weekend did produce some interesting developments among the early Oscar contenders - The Departed, Flags of Our Fathers, Marie Antoinette, and Running with Scissors. The first three films are performing well enough to continue generating Oscar buzz, but we'll have to wait until the end of the year to see the final contenders emerge. After two weeks of steadily worsening reviews, Running with Scissors has dropped out of serious Oscar consideration (though Annette Bening should still get a nomination) faster than Oklahoma dropped out of BCS contention.
The Departed earned close to $10 mil in its fourth weekend with only a 27% drop-off from last week, thus establishing itself as the proverbial "force to be reckoned with." Early expectations are that we'll see Martin Scorsese and The Departed going head-to-head with Clint Eastwood and Flags of Our Fathers at the Oscars. Think of this expected match-up like Jim Tressel and the Ohio State Buckeyes clashing with Lloyd Carr and the University of Michigan Wolverines. However, Marie Antoinette is lurking in the background much like the West Virginia Mountaineers are haunting the BCS standings. Critics completely dismissed the film early on, but the unexpected performance of Marie Antoinette over the past few weeks is completely disrupting these early stages of the Oscar race, much Oregon State's victory over USC has thrown the BCS rankings into complete turmoil.
Actually, Marie Antoinette is really more the University of Tennessee among current movies, not West Virginia - it's just not getting the respect it deserves. The early criticism of Marie Antoinette unfairly lingers and clouds current judgments of the film just like UT's one-point loss to Florida early in the season unfairly lingers and clouds current judgments of the team in the polls. The film is a stronger contender than the conventional wisdom recognizes and placing it behind other awards contenders (e.g., Running with Scissors) is a travesty not unlike Tennessee being ranked behind California in the BCS.
But getting back to the early Oscar predictions, I think The Departed has the edge now and should garner several nominations. Expect it to do well at the Golden Globes and emerge as the front runner heading into the Academy Awards. Yet, I think it will fall short in the major categories in the same way that Brokeback Mountain did last year. I imagine that Martin Scorsese will be left in the audience (rather than invited to the stage) scratching his head and feeling much like USC's head coach Pete Carroll did at the end of the third quarter on Saturday - overwhelmed by a sense of surreal disorder in the universe and wondering if what he's seeing is reality or some cruel trickery of the mind.