666 Tagged Articles at Cinematical

20th Century Fox has succeeded with their plan to capitalize on the 6-6-06 release date. Their remake of The Omen took in a reported $12.6 million, which is pretty good for a movie that was produced only to take advantage of a date. The movie joins this summer's trend of bad reviews = good box office and its one-day take puts it at the top for earnings on any Tuesday, beating out Meet the Fockers, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and Spider-Man 2. ComingSoon.net is also noting that The Omen now has the best Tuesday opening day total ever, previously held by Ali. I would like to point out, however, that since movies are never released on that particular day of the week unless it is Christmas (in the case of Ali) or another special date (in this case), that the achievement is not particularly remarkable.

We'll have to see if today's business, or the rest of the film's run, is also good for The Omen. I'm guessing that the novelty of yesterday's opening has already worn off, but that doesn't mean we won't see further attempts by studios to do similar schemes with release dates. I wonder if the makers of Fantastic Four and V for Vendetta are kicking themselves now.

Update:  Box Office Mojo has the full gross as $12,633,666. Notice those last three numbers.  Eerie.

The remake of The Omen comes out next week (on 6-6-06, of course), and there's a chance that it will come to your theater with a curse attached to it. John Moore, who directed the new version, spoke to Sci-Fi Wire about mysterious problems he encountered during the making of the film. These problems include ruined footage, difficulty with equipment and, here's the kicker, a computer that kept having a system "error 666" (wouldn't you know, the software is supposed to have no such error?), and Moore thinks that these problems were the result of the same misfortune that affected the first film.

Richard Donner's original was reportedly plagued by a curse, which brought about lightning, mad dogs, a bombing, a car accident, a plane crash and a beheading. I guess the curse got weaker after 30 years. Or maybe the curse couldn't be bothered with a movie that probably won't be as good? Who knows? My guess is that Fox just isn't creative enough to successfully sell the curse angle for marketing purposes and so they gave up on the idea (after messing up the production on purpose, perhaps).