Reject Report: This Weekend’s Box Office Looks “Dangerous”

Posted by John Cairns (jcairns@filmschoolrejects.com) on September 5, 2008

Welcome to the post-Summer Movie Season edition of the Reject Report! And you sure can tell it’s the post-summer edition, because there’s NOTHING on tap this weekend.

Well, almost nothing. This week’s column is going to be a very easy one for me to write, because there’s only one new movie in wide release. Bangkok Dangerous opens nationwide Friday, and that’s about it for movie fans. Unless, of course, you decide to venture to Toronto to the film festival there. Or to film festivals in Venice or other places. At your local movie theater, though, life is bad. Just the same old junk as last week, for the most part.

As a result, this week will be a relatively short Reject Report. Besides, I might as well make this column short, because next week a ton of movies are coming out and I’ll be up all night writing next week’s effort. I need my sleep, you know.

Onto the latest movie.

Bangkok Dangerous is written and directed by Danny and Oxide Pang — the Pang brothers — and is based on a 1999 movie of the same name made in Thailand. This one stars Nicolas Cage as Joe, an assassin in Bangkok to pull off a series of contract hit jobs. But things take an unexpected turn when he meets a young deaf-mute woman there and hires a pickpocket named Kong as an assistant. And Joe begins to question his lonely hitman existence and maybe get the heck out of it. Easier said than done, though, given the rough crowd he’s involved with.

So if you like action and movies set in Asia, this looks to be the movie for you. Heck, it’s the only new option out there, period, on 2,650 screens!!! The rest of these new flicks aren’t rolling out in a lot of theaters: Bottle Shock on 400 screens, Everybody Wants to be Italian on 96 screens, Transsiberian on 154 screens — you get the picture. You have to live in a big city to find the arthouses that will show a lot of these movies. But if you live in a place like, say, Alaska, fat chance will you find yourself with too many new options at theaters this weekend. So I say Bangkok Dangerous wins the weekend by default at $14 million.

So here is how I see the box office unfolding:

That is that for this week! See you later this weekend when we go over the final totals for the weekend here at the Reject Report!

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