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Hail to the King, baby.

Kim Hollis: The King's Speech expanded into 700 venues this weekend and earned an impressive $7.6 million, a per location average of $10,927. How impressed are you by this result? Which Oscar contender, this or True Grit, do you think had the most impressive weekend?

Reagen Sulewski: I tend to default to the lower screen count film in arguments like this, but it's closer than I would usually think for this discussion. True Grit was a hit already and no matter what happened this weekend (within reason) but there was still a question mark about how well The King's Speech would translate to mass audiences. Ultimately it was more important for The King's Speech to get this result than it was for True Grit to get its number, so I will side with Colin Firth, et al for now.

Josh Spiegel: The King's Speech had an impressive weekend, and just like True Grit, I see the film having strong word-of-mouth, but not in the same way. I saw this movie on Friday amidst a pretty packed crowd, and it was the first time where I was literally able to say I was the youngest person in the theater. The movie will do well with older audiences, but I don't see it hitting big, because it's...you know, good, but to quote Douglas Adams, "mostly harmless." It'll do well enough for The Weinstein Company, but I don't foresee it hitting as big as True Grit or, to a smaller extent, Black Swan.





Brett Beach: For what it's worth, both of these qualify as "Oscar Bait" (in the positive and pejorative sense). I have seen True Grit and will see The King's Speech as one of my three birthday movies today so I can't speak to the quality of one over the other, but I am more amazed by the relative breakout of True Grit than The King's Speech. The King's Speech has the royal family and there always seems to be a market for those stories.

Without sacrificing their individuality or vision, the Coens have taken a project that they could have made distinctly uncommercial or less commercial and made the most straight-ahead, mass crowd-pleasing film of their 25-year career. They have adapted Charles Portis' novel with a commanding fidelity, perhaps because it sounds like it could have been written by them 40-odd years ago. It also finds a direct line from O Brother Where Art Thou to A Serious Man, thus summing up the themes of their last ten years and seven films. The fact that a Western has taken off in a such a breathtaking blaze of a start is a considerable achievement. Early buzz and glowing reviews have been affirmed by sizzling word-of-mouth, in part I would wager, by audiences unexpectedly finding the deep spirituality of the story and recommending to friends who don't go to the movies often that this is worth their time. In that sense, True Grit is the Avatar of this season.

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