The Reject Report: Bees and Gangsters This Weekend

Posted by John Cairns (jcairns@filmschoolrejects.com) on November 2, 2007

Welcome to another stinging edition of The Reject Report, and my week’s resolution is to not get stung with my predictions this week. FOR A CHANGE. The top contenders at the box office include Bee Movie and American Gangster. And for a change it looks as if we will get two movies this weekend raking in a fair bit of dough. It’s about time people went back to see the movies, and about time we had some decent popcorn flicks, too.

Also, may I say a big hello to all of you screenwriters at home who have time on their hands and who suddenly have some free time to go see these latest movies. Actually, I don’t know whether you are on strike or not. I’m writing this on a Thursday and I don’t know if the writers have officially walked yet, but talks have broken off. So by the time you read this, the strike will probably be on. This writers strike nonsense is all anyone in Hollywood cares about right now.

I know it’s kind of meaningless to make box office predictions when there’s kind of a bigger story going on this week with all this strike talk, but here we go.

Bee Movie is the much anticipated Jerry Seinfeld computer-animated flick, and it also stars the voices of Renee Zellweger, Chris Rock, Matthew Broderick… it’s pretty much everyone on planet Earth in the cast. Ray Liotta is in it, Megan Mullally, basically everyone. Oprah Winfrey is in it (!). Larry King is in it (!!). Anyway, this is Seinfeld’s project and Seinfeld co-wrote the script. So this movie is a big test of whether the “Seinfeld Curse” is real or not.

The movie is about this bee who gets disillusioned about going into the honey business, and who becomes shocked to learn that humans have been stealing bees’ honey for years. So this bee sues, and all havoc ensues. Fun stuff, I’m sure the kids will be amused. This is your box office champ right here, $40 mil easy in over 3,500 theaters.

Next is American Gangster, which is being released to 3,000 or so theaters and has a cast of A-listers associated with it as well. Denzel Washington stars in this true-lfe story about Seventies drug lord Frank Lucas, who smuggled heroin into the USA from southeast Asia and ran a big heroin drug empire. Russell Crowe plays the detective out to bring him down. All I will say about Russell Crowe is that if this movie is anywhere as good as 3:10 to Yuma then this will be a good movie. But then, everyone might compare it to The Departed and say “this has nothing to do with the mob!” Well, it sounds like a different sort of mob here, but same thing. Ridley Scott is the director.

Finally, Martian Child features John Cusack, Joan Cusack, and Amanda Peet in this sweet movie about this science fiction writer who adopts a son, and the son think’s he’s a Martian. From all accounts this sounds like a sugary, mushy movie but there might be people out there who like that sort of thing, and it might be a good movie. We’ll see.

So here’s what I see happening at the box office this weekend:

So there you have it! See you at the end of the weekend when we go through the final totals here at The Reject Report.

Read more articles by John Cairns