The Reject Report Enters the ‘Twilight’ Zone

Posted by John Cairns (jcairns@filmschoolrejects.com) on November 21, 2008

You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of money; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination and how many movie tickets are sold. Your next stop, the Reject Zone.

This week, we have two movies on tap that are expected to do roaring business at the box office. One is the Disney CGI movie Bolt, and the other is Twilight, which as you know by now has been getting tons of press because of how fast people have been selling out theaters to watch this thing roll out from coast to coast. The advance sales for this have been through the roof. In any event, these are the two new contenders this week. Before I get to those I must put in a word again about, ahem, Bond — James Bond.

You may recall reading all the articles here at Film School Rejects about how Quantum of Solace made over $70 million dollars last weekend. What baloney that turned out to be. After a day or so the studio released different, more accurate totals. It turns out this flick made just $67.5 million in its opening weekend. Which is still a record, mind you, but I’m fed up with once again reporting on phony inflated numbers. I am suspecting the folks at Sony were doing what these studios usually do and providing box office projections that sounded good in press releases and in headlines. A nice round figure of $70 million sure sounds good, doesn’t it? So that’s what we got. That’s my theory on what happened.

Anyway, I don’t care what the reason was for the reported box office for Bond being off by almost three million. I’m just mad that all of us were fed wrong numbers yet again. How the heck can we do accurate reporting of the weekend box office if we’re given phony inflated numbers all the time?!

I’m just ranting. Let us now turn to the weekend’s movies, starting with Bolt.

Bolt is that CGI feature film from Walt Disney Animation Studios — not to be confused with the Pixar unit — and stars a varied cast of voices including stars the voices of John Travolta, Miley Cyrus, Malcolm McDowell, Diedrich Bader, Nick Swardson, Randy Savage and others. Travolta plays Bolt, a white dog who’s lived his whole life on Hollywood movie sets playing a superhero mutt on TV. As a result, Bolt believes he’s an actual superhero with actual powers. The story gets interesting, though, when Bolt is accidentally shipped to New York and must make his way back to the soundstage to be reunited with his owner, played by Miley Cyrus. That’s when our hero finds out he doesn’t have the superpowers he thinks he has.

What worries me a little is the rating: PG. I know that may not seem important to you, but a lot of parents out there might just think twice about taking their young kid to see Bolt. I know when I was a young kid I was pretty much banned from PG movies. My parents had a term for “PG” movies: “pure garbage”. So I think some parents might be scared off about taking their kids. I know that sounds silly and stupid, but it might be a factor. Anyhow, Bolt is going to do good business in the 3,500 theaters it will be shown in, and I am predicting $43 million. I don’t know if it will get more than that, though, because I just have this feeling that these families might be a little fed up with going to the movies after all these flicks they have been seeing (High School Musical 3, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, etc.).

Now onto Twilight. The story about this flick for weeks has been the slavish devotion of all these fans of the Stephenie Meyer series of novels, who have been grabbing tickets online and selling out hundreds of theaters. Catherine Hardwicke directs this love story featuring Kristen Stewart as Bella and Robert Pattinson as Edward, the vampire she falls in love with.

Summit Entertainment is distributing this movie into 3,200 theaters at last count, and we have seen a frenzy from teenage girls and other fans of the novels. We’ve seen lineups of people camping out and waiting for these premieres and preview performances. Sales of the soundtrack have been through the roof — it went Number One this week. Midnight performances for Twilight are showing in some 2,000 theaters where this thing is opening on Friday, and it’s expected these theaters will be jam packed. Earlier this week MovieTickets.com announced that 1,100 theaters had been sold out for the movie. Wow, that’s a lot of theaters, folks, AND a lot of money to be made. MovieTickets.com also had this flick in the Top Ten of pre-sales for all time, right up there with all these Star Wars movies.

I have a feeling that Twilight will open extremely big on Friday, and then cool off after that. I am predicting about $65 million for this movie. I’d put the figure higher, except the theater count is too low for my liking and I just don’t see how guys will be interested in this movie. Twilight looks like it is having a similar effect as Sex and the City did this summer: it’s turned teenage girls crazy. (Anyway, we guys still have James Bond, right? We can’t win them all.)

Here’s how I see the weekend unfolding:

There you have it. Back at weekend’s end when The Reject Report finds out who takes a bite out of the box office. Will it be the vampire — or the dog? Stay tuned.

Read more articles by John Cairns