The Reject Report: Oh My God! Evan Almighty Drowns in a Flood of Sequels!

Posted by John Cairns (jcairns@filmschoolrejects.com) on June 24, 2007

“Oh my God!” That’s what the deeply-religious people at Universal have to be saying after Evan Almighty’s ungodly, purgatory-worthy performance this weekend.

Sure it finished first. But the take is only $32,000,000 in the USA, and that’s well below what everyone was predicting or even hoping for. Word was that Universal was predicting no worse than $40 mil, minimum! A $32 million opening weekend is a complete debacle, ladies and gentlemen, for a flick that cost over two hundred million dollars to make! These executives are going to jump off roofs of buildings at Universal, because there’s no way this movie is getting its money back. “Oh my God” is right.

Also disappointing was A Mighty Heart which brought in about $4 mil this weekend, in spite of the star power of Angelina Jolie. That’s another group of people going “oh my God”, and not in a good way either.

A big story was the drop for Fantastic Four 2. It took a huge dip this weekend, down something like 65 percent!! They only made about $20 mil this weekend in the USA and were fighting just to hang onto second place. People were saying it was the “end of the sequel slump” when Fantastic Four 2 made $58 mil in its first week, but based on its drop this week the slump is obviously back on. As for 1408, which ended up in a dead heat with The Fantastic Four 2 for second place at $20 million, it actually did about as well as expected. Not bad for a horror movie.

About these sequels: there have been lots of stories in the press lately about how sequels are underperforming at the box office. Sure, they might top the box office the first week, but then they drop like a rock the following week like Fantastic Four 2 just did. Or they miss their projections like Evan Almighty and Ocean’s Thirteen did. The theory is that people are sick of sequels. They’re unoriginal and mostly mediocre, and besides that there are too many of them. We are far from done with them, either. We haven’t gotten to the latest Harry Potter sequel yet, or the latest Bourne movie yet. We haven’t gotten to the much-anticipated (!) (?) Rush Hour III yet.

Am I the only guy who thinks Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan are worth watching? Rush Hour III really is the least-anticipated sequel of all time. Everyone is complaining that they don’t want to see yet another Rush Hour movie with these two idiots in it again, but they’re getting one anyway. I suppose there must be something to these “sequel slump’ stories based on reactions to that one movie alone.

At least these sequels still finish at the top of the box office! That should all change this week, though. On Wednesday Bruce Willis comes back, as Live Free or Die Hard gets an early jump at the theaters. But Pixar hits back Friday with Ratatouille, which promises to be funny and original, and most importantly it’s not a sequel. An established franchise in Die Hard is possibly, probably, going to get beat by something new for a change! Be ready for an absolute flood (pardon the pun) of “people are sick of sequels” stories this week, just based on this.

WEEKEND BOX OFFICE RESULTS (source: Box Office Mojo)

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