The Reject Report Comes Back

Posted by John Cairns (jcairns@filmschoolrejects.com) on October 19, 2007

Welcome to my Comeback Week at the Reject Report. Well, at least I hope it’s a comeback week for me with my predictions, since I’ve been getting them wrong lately. And I hope it’s a comeback week for the overall box office as well. But I doubt it. The general feeling among all the box office prognosticators is that all the studios dumped their flop movies on us this very week. None of these movies look like blockbusters, and some (ie. The Comebacks) look like unwatchable crud — based on what we are seeing from these ads on TV.

Anyway here is a look at the week’s contenders at the box office, and there are a ton of them. 30 Days of Night is a horror flick from Sony / Columbia rolling out on 2,700 screens, and it stars Josh Hartnett. It was initially a comic book series and took place in Barrow, Alaska, where you literally do get 30 days of night. The premise of the comic books was that vampires go up to Barrow and terrorize the place. Hartnett plays the sheriff trying to save the town from the vampires. The movie is directed by David Slade, but before they settled on him this movie went through a revolving door of people and studios. Not a good sign, but I will predict something in the $14 mil range for it.

The Comebacks from Fox Atomic rolls out on 2,800 screens and is brought to you by the same people who produced Wedding Crashers. It’s supposed to be a big spoof of every sports movie out there, Rocky Balboa, Remember the Titans, Talladega Nights, you name it. It looks to me like it’s sort of the Scary Movie of sports flicks. But it also looks really dumb, which is why I think it will only get $10 mil. Carl Weathers of Rocky fame is one of the guys in this.

Rendition, from New Line, rolls out in 2,200 theaters. Here, a terrorism suspect goes missing on a flight from South Africa to Washington D.C., and it is up to his American wife Reese Witherspoon to figure out what happened with his disappearance. Turns out this guy was taken away by the Americans. One of the CIA guys is played by Jake Gyllenhall, and Meryl Streep and Alan Arkin are in this movie as well. The name comes from the term used to describe the extrajudicial transfer of a person from one country to another. Anyway, that’s Rendition, and I have trouble thinking this will get more that $8 mil. I mean, if Michael Clayton can only get $10 mil, there’s no way this is doing much better than $8 mil in my book.

Gone Baby Gone, from Miramax, is on 1,500 screens, and is the directorial debut of Ben Affleck. It stars Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan as two PIs on the prowl looking for a 4-year old girl who was abducted in Boston. It looks like a pretty good cast with Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris in it. Monaghan, of course, was last seen as the love interest for Ben Stiller in The Heartbreak Kid, so it’s nice to see she’s getting steady work. But I don’t think this will do as well as The Heartbreak Kid did, so I say $7 million.

The Ten Commandments (2007) is on 830 screens and is an animated feature with an all-star cast including Christian Slater as Moses, along with Ben Kingsley, Alfred Molina and Elliott Gould. Anyway, this doesn’t look like a top 10 movie to me. If it were the original Ten Commandments movie with Charlton Heston in it, maybe it would do better. But it isn’t.

Things We Lost in the Fire is from Paramount (DreamWorks) on 1,000 screens. It’s notable because the cast features Halle Berry and Benicio del Toro in it. Berry plays a recent widow whose husband was killed, and she falls for del Toro. Anyway, I say $4 million, and I’m being generous here. I think the only reason it makes any money at all is because Halle Berry is in it.

Sarah Landon and the Paranormal Hour is in about 1,100 theaters and is about a teenager who is wondering why ghosts are haunting her town. Doesn’t look like it will make too much money, though. I say maybe a million.

And finally, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas in Disney Digital 3-D, a re-issue of the original in the digital format, will be on 500 screens. Check it out.

So anyway, that’s a ton of movies coming out all at once and I tend to go with the consensus that we are in for a big week of flops, with all these movies cancelling each other out as far as box office is concerned. Right now I say $14 million will be enough to win the box office for our champ this week, which I think will be 30 Days of Night. But who knows. Tyler Perry’s movie could well win again if it holds up well enough. And The Comebacks could win if the audiences are stupid enough.

Here is what we are looking at for box office this weekend.

That’s it for now. See you at the end of the weekend when we will find out how way off my predictions are yet again.

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