Monday Morning Quarterback

By BOP Staff

April 3, 2012

Cue the Teddy Pendergrass.

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Max Braden: So in the tough-talking action hero fantasies, we now have John Carter opening at $30 million, Immortals at $32 million, and Wrath of the Titans at $33 million. The one positive that the Titans have this weekend is that they can say that John Carter should feel really, really embarrassed.

[insert enraged Fables rant here]

Kim Hollis: Mirror Mirror, the Julia Roberts fractured fairy tale, opened to a modest $18.1 million. What do you take from this result?

Bruce Hall: I know that anybody who was cryogenically frozen in 1999 and revived just last month will be excited to see a new Julia Roberts film in theaters. Everyone else either straggled in to finally see The Hunger Games, or took their kids to the park for the first time in six months. In other news, it's been awhile since I've read so many reviews criticizing a fairy tale for being so flat and lifeless. How do you ruin a fairy tale? Apparently, you take the humanity out of it and make it as impenetrable as an episode of Lost. Luckily, there's ANOTHER "reimagining" of Snow White hitting theaters this summer. It boasts a slightly more relevant cast, which might help make it a hit. There's also the chance that audiences will say "What, another one?" and stay away entirely. I predict the results will be somewhere in between.

A high percentage of the audience for The Hunger Games included families. The same was true of Mirror Mirror this week, though obviously in far fewer numbers. I wonder if, along with the more obvious factors, a lot of groups and families just found it cost prohibitive to hit the cineplex two weekends in a row?




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Brett Beach: It's an okay opening. I don't think there was any effort to sell this as an event picture (which the marketing for Snow White and the Huntsman does appear to be doing for whatever it's worth) and Julia Roberts playing the Evil Queen isn't worth the box office gold it might once have been. They also couldn't sell "from the director of The Cell, The Fall and Immortals" since this is a PG family film. I can't imagine the studio was expecting this to be a breakout and as the buzz for the Hunger Games began to build, they had to realize they might be in the second weekend shadow. With a budget under $100 million, this won't be a disaster by any means, but I don't know if even the global total will make it anything to write home about.

Felix Quinonez: I think it's an okay opening. Not terrible, definitely not great. I thought the commercials were pretty terrible, it got horrible reviews, and as much as people don't want to admit, I don't think Julia Roberts is much of a draw anymore. I think they should be happy with what they got.

David Mumpower: I'm going to disagree with my peers here. An $85 million production starring Julia Roberts simply has to do better than an $18.1 million debut. From the moment this trailer was unleashed upon humanity, we all knew that Relativity Media didn't have the goods. Everything about it looked inferior and through that narrow spectrum, perhaps an argument can be made that disaster has been averted at least somewhat. In reality, this is a movie that is inferior to not one but two freshman television shows, Grimm and Once Upon a Time. People like the concept well enough to reward those programs with five to ten million viewers each week. That means at least twice as big an opening weekend if not four times as much was available to a better film. Last weekend's opener, The Hunger Games, was a triumph of epic proportions. This weekend's new releases are both slightly above worst case scenario results but certainly not acceptable performances.


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