Monday Morning Quarterback

By BOP Staff

April 4, 2011

If you don't watch Fast Five later this month, I'm going to beat down your candy ass.

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Reagen Sulewski: Personally I'm taking this as another data point for calibrating my Hollywood Hunkometer. A Gyllenhaal is worth about 80% of a Cooper, which is in turn worth about 80% of a Damon.

Shalimar Sahota: Firstly, there's the whole concept of what this film is selling. Despite being a brilliantly original idea, I saw it to be insanely difficult to get across on a poster, and a struggle to cram into TV spot (it was the full trailer that sold it to me). I imagine some were already put off of watching, fearing that they'll be sat there confused. I thought this might open a touch higher, but nevertheless I'd say this makes for a good opening. Add in the overwhelmingly strong reviews and I can only hope that good word-of-mouth will allow it to stick around.

Edwin Davies: This isn't as good as a result as I personally would have liked, since I'm a huge fan of Moon and would love to see Duncan Jones have the sort of success that would allow him to bring his talents to a huge audience, but it's still a really solid result for an original film with a premise which, whilst easy to grasp in the context of the film, is hard to boil down for the purposes of a poster or TV spot. In terms of the recent glut of science fiction films, I'd say that it isn't as impressive as Limitless's performance, but is better than The Adjustment Bureau just in terms of the relative budgets and marketing of the two.

David Mumpower: Edwin, I would argue that Duncan Jones' career is expanding at an even better rate than the Spaced trio. Moon earned $5 million domestically. His follow-up project in the same genre has roughly tripled that on opening weekend. I conclude from this that the impeccable quality of Moon and increased distribution skill from Summit Entertainment has led to a largely out of nowhere solid opening weekend. Let's put this in perspective. Reagen's very funny comment notwithstanding, Jake Gyllenhaal is not a box office draw. I will love him always and forever for Bubble Boy, but if we ignore the one outlier, Jarhead, and a disaster porn picture whose success had nothing to do with him, everything else Gyllenhaal has done is either a single digits opening weekend or, even worse, Prince of Persia. I place a lot of the credit squarely on the shoulders of David Bowie's son, a director whose reputation is growing at an exponential rate. All he needs is for Steven Spielberg to take Jones under his wing to start opening films north of $50 million. The quality as well as the perception of quality are already there.




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Say what you want... "insidious" is a fantastic word

Kim Hollis: Insidious, the first major release from the upstart distributor FilmDistrict, opened to $13.3 million. Are you surprised by this result, or is it roughly what you would expect from James Wan, the writer of the original Saw?

Josh Spiegel: I didn't hear much about Insidious until the last few days, and what I saw looked like a version of Paranormal Activity with famous people. Lo and behold, the film is not only from the folks behind the original Saw movie, but also from the director of Paranormal Activity! While the result isn't too bad, especially from a new distributor, I wonder if we're slowly beginning the slide into people not wanting to watch found-footage horror movies anymore. I'd advocate such a change, but who knows. Either way, the result is OK - not too bad, not too good, but an OK start.


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