Weekend Forecast for March 18-20, 2011
By Reagen Sulewski
March 18, 2011
For the first weekend of March Madness, there's an oddly male-centric lineup of films hitting theaters. It's not the potential effect of competition between the films and live sports that I find odd – the effect is usually overstated – but rather it's that no one even tried to counter-program.
March has been a strange month for movies and box office. Most of the films this month have been terrible, and many of the most successful have been some of the worst reviewed of the bunch. This week's trio of new films are all at least decently reviewed, and none looks even close to breaking out. Go figure.
Of the three, the one with the best chance is the slightly ironically titled Limitless, thanks to its star power. Bradley Cooper plays a layabout loser who's offered an experimental drug that allows him to tap into every part of his brain simultaneously, which turns him into a human dynamo, capable of dominating Wall Street, charming any woman and essentially making him the best version of himself. The only problem: You have to keep taking the drug, or else. With his supply threatened, a business mogul played by Robert DeNiro seizes on this fact, trying to leverage Cooper's abilities for his own evil intent.
Early ads played on the inherent fun of the concept of having an all-powerful mind, with the intrigue of the plot entering in later on, making it look a bit like The Game, which opened to $14 million back in 1997. That's almost ancient history in box office terms, but still somehow seems appropriate. Bradley Cooper, despite appearing in hits like The Hangover and The A-Team, doesn't seem to have really broken through as a box office factor on his own, needing some kind of hook. And as Matt Damon just showed, paranoid thrillers tend to take money off the top of your box office potential, not add to it. I said the title was kind of ironic. Opening at around 2,800 venues, Limitless should make it to about $16 million this weekend.
If Paul doesn't do well at the box office, it won't be because of lack of ad support. The latest collaboration between Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (but directed by Greg Mottola instead of Edgar Wright) has been nearly omnipresent on TV. How effective those ads will be is a bigger question. Pegg and Frost play to their strengths as a couple of English nerds traveling through the American southwest looking for aliens. And then they find one, a short, foulmouthed, pop-culture-obsessed Gray voiced by Seth Rogen, who's escaped from a military base and is trying to get back to his mothership, with federal agents on his tail.
Pegg and Frost are kind of a British, geeky Abbott and Costello, who've gained Alpha Geek status through their tremendous work in Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. That the general public hasn't heard of any of those things is kind of a problem for Paul, though it does have the studio support, as mentioned, and a legitimately wide release, in about 2,800 venues. Strangely, with what looks like their weakest film, they're about to have their biggest success.
The box office charts are littered with the corpses of cult and niche comedies, especially when those comedies are designed to appeal specifically to geeks. A recent example that comes to mind is Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, which got its target audience and no one else. Even star power can't help all that much when you're going after the freaks and not the norms, and it doesn't help when your biggest name is a voice only. Although it's solidly reviewed, I expect this one to start out slowly at around $9 million.
Several years ago, the idea of Matthew McConaughey in an adaptation of a legal thriller would have inspired a lot of excitement. And by several, I mean about 15. Now, with years and years passed, and mountains of terrible rom-coms on his resume, his starring in The Lincoln Lawyer can barely get it any promotion. Almost an invisible film, it stars Duder McBongos as a defense attorney who operates his office out of a Lincoln town car. Quirky, huh? He's then hired to defend a Beverly Hills playboy (Ryan Phillippe) on a murder rap, at which point things get all murky and underworldy. The film is based on a fairly popular novel so there's some hope for it, but the Grisham oeuvre has largely been supplanted by TV lawyer and forensic shows, and it's difficult to get audiences to pay for what's seen as only marginally better than what's available for free. Despite quite favorable reviews, this looks set to land with an unceremonious flop, and around $7 million.
This means that even with Battle: Los Angeles' abysmal reviews, it still has a chance to repeat at the top of the box office, albeit about a 50/50 shot, or about the ratio of box office it'll keep in its second weekend. The noisy, 'splosion-filled alien invasion film should drop to about $16 million this weekend.
Meanwhile, Rango landed somewhere in the middle of the public's opinion, shedding 40% of its business in its second weekend. I look for around $14 million here, as it shimmies its way to $90 million at the end of the frame. Following that we should have another of last weekend's debuts that will sink like as stone, as Red Riding Hood adds just $6 million more to its coffers, while The Adjustment Bureau matches that on its way to around $75 million total.
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Forecast: Weekend of March 18-20, 2011
|
Rank |
Film |
Number of
Sites |
Changes in Sites
from Last |
Estimated
Gross ($) |
|
1
|
Limitless
|
2,756
|
New
|
16.7
|
|
2
|
Battle: Los Angeles
|
3,417
|
0
|
16.1
|
|
3
|
Rango
|
3,843
|
-80
|
14.3
|
|
4
|
Paul
|
2,801
|
New
|
9.5
|
|
5
|
The Lincoln Lawyer
|
2,707
|
New
|
7.2
|
|
6
|
The Adjustment Bureau
|
2,655
|
-192
|
6.4
|
|
7
|
Red Riding Hood
|
3,030
|
0
|
6.2
|
|
8
|
Mars Needs Moms
|
3,117
|
0
|
4.1
|
|
9
|
Hall Pass
|
1,905
|
-650
|
3.2
|
|
10
|
Beastly
|
1,810
|
-149
|
3.0
|
|
|
|
|
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