Tweet

Welcome to another edition of the Reject Report, and things are really screwed up this week. I gotta say, as a new box office columnist I hate it when movies open up two days early. It screws up my predictions!

As you all know by now, Live Free or Die Hard already opened all over America, on Wednesday. So, first of all, I am already late making predictions on Live Free or Die Hard because it’s already opened. Second, how do I classify what happens to Live Free or Die Hard? Do I predict their three-day total, or their take for the whole five days?! Opening two days early almost seems like cheating in my book. You collect a five-day take, and then if that total finishes ahead of some movie that did better daily business over a three-day weekend, you can claim in your ads to be the number one movie in the United States! Even if it isn’t! Sneaky.

And this is going to happen next week, too, with Transformers, and the week after that with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix! They’re all being rolled out early, so the box office totals are going to be all screwed up for the next three weeks. These five-day weekends just drive me crazy.

I might as well run down the movies going wide this weekend.

Live Free or Die Hard is the fourth in the series of Die Hard movies. Bruce Willis reprises his famous role once again as grizzled NYPD cop John McClane. He comes back to team up with a young computer hacker to help fight these even worse Internet super-hackers in Washington, D.C. The hackers are attempting to take out the entire communications infrastructure of the USA, affecting transportation and the power supply—-so they can raid Americans of all of their personal financial data and destroy the country. The movie is shades of the original Die Hard with plenty of special effects, including car wrecks, trucks shot up by fighter planes, buildings getting blown up, and scenes of Bruce Willis in elevator shafts and the like. And of course, the requisite scenes of people getting shot. Fun stuff.

The problem is there are all these stories out there about how mediocre the tracking for this movie is. The reviews have been decent enough, but I get the sense that there’s a ho-hum attitude from critics towards this movie. As if they’ve seen it all before. Anyway, $45 million for the five days would be my guess, because even though there are a lot of fans for this movie, you get the sense there just isn’t the enthusiasm for this movie that there could be. Box Office Mojo is actually reporting that Live Free or Die Hard was Number One and made $9,111,638 on Wednesday. So if they do nine million a day right through the weekend that adds up to $45 million.

Ratatouille is a Pixar animated feature about a rat named Remy who goes to Paris, France to fulfill his dream of becoming a great chef. Problem is, he’s a rat! And rats aren’t exactly welcome in the restaurants in Paris, France. So it’s basically one rat’s struggle to achieve his dream in spite of all kinds of obstacles. Pixar is known for hitting it out of the ballpark with just about every movie they make these days and this is no exception, the reviews are glowing for this flick. The movie is getting a 91 from Metacritics and a 92% from Rotten Tomatoes, and Variety and Hollywood Reporter have nothing but good things to say about it. You would think based on all that that the box office would be big. But I keep reading stories about a possible “cartoon slump”. Everyone is freaked out because Surf’s Up didn’t do all that well. On the other hand, Surf’s Up didn’t receive the kind of notices Ratatouille is getting, and the tracking for the food-loving rat is supposed to be big. $60 million would be the best estimate, because that’s the weekend total that Cars brought in last year and you would think Ratatouille would do just as well. If the movie does as well as The Incredibles, it would hit $70 million. The theater count is big. Ratatouille is screening in 3,940 theaters according to Box Office Mojo. This movie is doing good business no matter what.

Michael Moore’s latest documentary Sicko goes wide this weekend. The film, which screened at Cannes earlier this year, features Moore on the loose again, investigating the state of America’s crumbling health care system. In this movie, Moore rakes America’s health insurers over the coals, roasts the politicians in Washington, looks at health care systems in other countries around the world, and checks out the universal health coverage at Guantanamo Bay. The word is that this is less politically-charged than the other films Moore has done—he’s focused more on evil insurance companies as opposed to politicians. But Moore is still a bit of a divisive figure and there are lots of people who will never see a Michael Moore movie no matter what, just because he’s Michael Moore.

The other thing is that Moore has been loudly complaining about video piracy affecting his box office. Copies of Sicko were leaked onto the Internet weeks ago and the press wrote a bunch of stories publicizing that. I’m sure Michael Moore was pleased with this unwanted publicity; everyone knows by now that you can find this film free on the Internet, and that could affect the gate in the long run. Sicko was rolled out last week ahead of schedule in response to the piracy threat, screened in only one theater in New York City. It packed the joint, and reports are that people were actually turned away! The film made $68,969 in its opening weekend alone in just one theater in New York City, according to Box Office Mojo. Impressive. This week Sicko goes wide, but only to 400-or-so theaters. Lionsgate is moving slowly with this release, hoping for buzz and good word of mouth. I expect this movie to take in around $6 million this weekend and for the theater count to grow in the weeks ahead.

Finally, Evening stars Vanessa Redgrave and Claire Danes in a movie about a woman stricken with cancer who reflects on a weekend years earlier when she met the love of her life. It’s opening wide on 978 screens and is distributed by Focus Features. I estimate about $3 to $4 million, which would not even be a Top Ten finish in my calculations. Also, the critics have just murdered this movie, so I am not expecting much.

My predictions for this weekend are as follows:

We should point out that earlier this week Fantastic Four 2 passed the $100 million grand total at the box office, which means only one thing: Fantastic Four 3. Also, 1408 is starting to drop like a rock, so the “horror slump” is back on again.

I’ll be back Monday to rehash this weekend and preview what to expect with the July 4th blockbuster Transformers– which, by the way, has debuted in South Korea and will be shown on several US screens as early as Monday.