Movie News
The Reject Report is Wide Awake
Posted by John Cairns (jcairns@filmschoolrejects.com) on November 29, 2007
Welcome to the post-Thanksgiving Reject Report, and we are all a little sleepy from eating turkey and watching football on TV. Me, I’m just sleepy from watching football. But I digress. Anyway, it seems the distributors are taking the week off as far as new releases are concerned. There’s only one big movie going wide, Awake, and I don’t even know if it’ll even be a number one movie!
Anyway, it makes my job easier as a Reject Report writer when there is only one major movie debuting in wide release. I can spend less time doing research on all the weekend’s movies and get my preview out of the way — and then I can look at last week’s box office totals when making my predictions. Makes my life a LOT easier.
On to the latest, er, movie.
Awake is from MGM and Weinstein and rolls out on about 2,000 screens. It stars Hayden Christensen as a man who suffers from what is called “anasthetical awareness,” a condition that leaves this guy awake and conscious but totally paralyzed during heart surgery. And he cannot warn doctors about this condition, and they’re about to cut the poor guy open in the middle of surgery! AAAARGH!
Good stuff. The fun, popular-with-guys Jessica Alba stars as his wife, and Terrence Howard and Lena Olin are in the cast. I read somewhere that this movie is trying to do for surgeries what Jaws did for sharks. If that’s the case then we are in for a very scary movie.
Anyway, I am sure the Jessica Alba fans will be there to see her again, but I don’t think the buzz is there for this flick. Neither is the theater count. I think maybe it will be $10 mil, tops, for this flick. That’s as far as it’s getting this weekend: Number Two.
There are also some other flicks showing up on one or two screens, but this weekend at the movies is shaping up to be pretty much like LAST weekend, with Amy Adams cleaning up again at the box office.
My predictions for the weekend:
| Release | Predicted Gross |
| Enchanted | $19,000,000 |
| Awake | $10,000,000 |
| This Christmas | $9,500,000 |
| Beowulf | $8,000,000 |
| Bee Movie | $7,000,000 |
| Hitman | $6,500,000 |
| Fred Claus | $6,000,000 |
| No Country for Old Men | $5,700,000 |
| August Rush | $5,500,000 |
| The Mist | $4,900,000 |
There you have it! My predictions for a sleepy weekend at the movies! See you at weekend’s end when we look over the totals here at Film School Rejects.
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