EdgeOfDarkness Tagged Articles at Cinematical

It took a Nicholas Sparks adaptation starring Channing Tatum to finally knock Avatar from the perch it held for seven weeks. Dear John grossed an estimated $32.4 million to Avatar's $23.6 -- but Sparks/Tatum is such a potent combination that I wonder if the movie wouldn't have done non-trivially better had it not opened against the Superbowl. As it stands, it still has by far the best opening weekend for a Nicholas Sparks flick, though it's not clear what kind of legs it's going to have -- it will get some stiff competition from Garry Marshall's Valentine's Day next weekend.

As for Avatar, I went for a second viewing on Friday -- more out of a desire to see it in (real) IMAX than out of any abiding love for the film. Before the movie began, someone took an impromptu poll of the sold-out crowd to find out how many had already seen it -- and I saw, oh, thirty or forty hands go up. Presumably, most if not all of them brought friends. As with Titanic, there's where a good part of those record-breaking grosses comes from. Avatar is merrily marching toward an astronomical $700 million. Saints preserve us, etc.

From Paris with Love opened in third place with a weak $8.1 million, and is a mulligan for Fox, Luc Besson and Pierre Morel. Their Taken was a surprise hit in early 2009, but I guess the novelty value of seeing Liam Neeson as a badass secret agent dominates the novelty value of seeing John Travolta as same. (Taken's elegant, simple storyline hook probably played a part too, especially as compared to the incomprehensible jumble that is From Paris with Love.)

More, and the top 10, after the jump.

Avatar enjoyed a seventh straight week atop the box office, a streak that may come to an end next week depending on how much traction bald and crazy John Travolta gets with audiences (and also how popular Dear John, the mother of all chick flicks, turns out to be). In the meantime, though, as Monika reported earlier in the week, Avatar is now the top-grossing movie of all-time internationally. In the next couple of days it will also pass Titanic to take that title domestically. So that's pretty much the end of that.

Edge of Darkness came in second, though it's an ambiguous result: you have to go back to the mid-90s to find a mainstream Mel Gibson vehicle that opened to as little as $17 million. On the other hand, it's the guy's first role in seven years -- and in a rather nondescript film noir in the middle of January at that. I wouldn't read too much into it, though the movie's $80 million budget raises some questions. The fantasy rom-com When in Rome didn't have a lot of competition for its target audience, but had to battle terrible reviews for its okay $12 million take.

Legion took the biggest hit of the holdovers, dropping over 60% to 6th place; it may have wound up on the wrong side of the ludicrous/enjoyable divide for most people. Meanwhile, Sherlock Holmes is about to eke past the $200 million mark, Alvin and the Chipmunks already has, and Nancy Meyers' It's Complicated just skated past $100 million. Those are last year's three Christmas Day releases, which appear to have been perfectly calculated to stay out of each other's way in the ensuing weeks.

The full top 10 after the jump.

Bodies bob to the surface of a deserted river. A playful little girl is captured on home video. A troubled man waits for his daughter. Edge of Darkness, a powerhouse dramatic thriller directed by Martin Campbell, tends a bed of smoldering embers that occasionally, unexpectedly, explodes into a raging fire.

The largest ember is Craven, a Boston police detective. As played by Mel Gibson, Craven becomes a man on a mission only after his daughter is shot dead in front of his eyes. Before that, his life is a blank slate, more notable for the things that are missing rather than any sense of purpose. Unresolved questions follow him around like a lost puppy: why didn't he visit his only daughter? Why did he demonstrate so little interest in her career or her friends? What happened to his wife, evidently long gone from the scene? Why doesn't he have any friends? What kind of police detective is he?

From the evidence presented, Craven is a haunted loner with deep reserves of seething anger and brutal competence. The death of his daughter destroys him, as though he himself had absorbed the shotgun blast to the gut, but there's never any question that his own brand of justice will be served. First, though, he has to figure out who was trying to kill him.

So have you heard about this movie Avatar? I hear it's doing pretty well. So well in fact that it now holds the title of second highest grossing domestic film of all time, having passed The Dark Knight this weekend. Legion and The Tooth Fairy did OK business but Extraordinary Measures opened in 8th with a mere $6 million. Here's the top five:

1. Avatar: $34.9 million
2. Legion: $17.5 million
3. The Book of Eli: $15.7 million
4. The Tooth Fairy: $14 million
5. The Lovely Bones: $8.4 million

Two new releases this week. One brooding thriller and one light romantic comedy.

Edge of Darkness
What's It All About: Mel Gibson stars in this thriller based on a BBC mini-series playing a police detective investigating the death of his political activist daughter.
Why It Might Do Well: Director Martin Campbell also helmed a pretty successful little flick called Casino Royale, as well as the original TV version of Edge of Darkness.
Why It Might Not Do Well: Mel's image has tarnished badly in recent years. Might that effect sales? We shall see.
Number of Theaters: 3,000
Prediction: $24 million

When in Rome
What's It All About: Kristen Bell plays an American vacationing in Rome who plucks several coins from a love fountain and soon finds herself pursued by an equal number of colorful suitors.
Why It Might Do Well: Bell was a delight in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Veronica Mars.
Why It Might Not Do Well: Sadly the trailer gives the impression of a dopey romantic comedy.
Number of Theaters: 2,200
Prediction: $12 million

Note: The following will contain spoilers for The Book Of Eli.

This week, Warner Bros. launches its first big January release with The Book Of Eli. In it, Denzel Washington plays an apocalyptic loner on a mission to put the sacred book he carries into the right hands. There is no twist in revealing that the pages within the leather-bound book containing a cross on the front is a copy of the King James Bible, the supposed last one in existence. In Todd McCarthy's Variety review, he stated that if "Warner Bros. cared to court the normally stay-at-home Christian audience, it would hit a mother lode of positive response." Despite any inherent ignorance that anyone of the Catholic faith are shut-ins who don't go to the movies, McCarthy apparently hasn't been paying attention. Perhaps "courting" isn't the right terminology, but the studio certainly hasn't been shying away from the themes, whether it be to challenge or embrace them.

Counting out Signs and We Were Soldiers, it's been nearly a decade since Mel Gibson's knocked some skulls (if you're willing to factor in 2000's The Patriot; if not, then exactly a decade since 1999's Payback), and in the trailer for Edge of Darkness -- embedded post-jump -- it looks like old habits die hard.

Gibson plays a Boston detective whose daughter is killed in a hit meant for him. Naturally, he starts knocking on doors and following trails to determine if his daughter had actually been the target all along, and why. Writer William Monahan is no stranger to either Beantown (The Departed) or elaborate conspiracies (Body of Lies), and director Martin Campbell (Casino Royale) already made a BBC miniseries out of the material back in 1985. (No wonder it was reminding me of State of Play, title similarities aside.)

I wasn't sure then why a film with such firepower on paper was being relegated to next January, but it seems to be in stride with the turning tide of this past January's strong performance. Just as The Cabin in the Woods 3-D had been pushed back to the same weekend that My Bloody Valentine 3-D had, I believe that Darkness is being positioned on the same weekend that Taken had for a reason. (Even the poster is not far from that of the righteous-father flick.)

Let's hope Mel McKickass has all the right reasons to warm things up next winter.

The last time we got to see Mel Gibson on the big screen, it was in The Singing Detective. Six years, some violent films, and an infamous arrest later, and we're finally getting another dose as he plays a homicide cop in Martin Campbell's Edge of Darkness. The film centers on a cop (Gibson) who watches his daughter (Bojana Novakovic) die, and then sets out to find the people who killed her.

Darkness is slated to hit screens later this year, and to kick off the buzz, an image has been released to Empire, which you can see in its entirety here. The image shows Gibson kneeling over a body, in front of a cop car and parts of what seems to be another totaled car, looking peeved. Try as I might, but I can't view this picture in the proper context. All I can see is a cautionary tale about what could've happened had Gibson not been pulled over by the cops that night in 2006. Cop cars, debris, and dead bodies doesn't seem like the best way to make us forget the past and focus on the present. It'd be like Lindsay Lohan trying to get back into the swing of things by playing a careless, drunken moviestar. Or Robert Downey Jr. cleaning up, and then doing Less Than Zero.

So that leads me to wonder: Can you forget about a star's real-life troubles when you see them on the big screen? Does reality fall away and leave nothing but the story, or do looks, scenarios, and other subtleties pull you out of the plot and right into memories of misconduct? What do you forgive, and what's hard to forget?

Green Lantern fans have had to endure a long and painful slog for their comic to see its way to a big screen adaptation. It's not over quite yet, but we might be inching closer to the finish line.

The latest man to contend for the director's chair is Martin Campbell, who's still coming off Casino Royale and just completed Edge of Darkness, also known as Mel Gibson's acting comeback. The previous candidate for the job was screenwriter Greg Berlanti, but Warner Bros. most likely chickened out of giving a tentpole comic book project to a guy with only The Broken Hearts Club to his name as a director. Berlanti's screenplay is still the one Warners is working with.

Campbell, by the way, is possibly the most inconsistent filmmaker in the business. Not only is he capable of making films that are fantastic (Casino Royale), and mediocre (Vertical Limit), and dreadful (Beyond Borders), but he can go from hugely entertaining to ass-boring within the same franchise. (I'm thinking, of course, of The Mask of Zorro and The Legend of Zorro). At least the anticipation won't bore you: you really don't know what you're gonna get.

Of course, one possibility is that Watchmen comes along and ruins all other superhero movies the way The Wire ruined all other cop shows, and then I'll care about Green Lantern about as much as I care about CSI (uh, not at all).

Here's a round-up of some stuff (and things) currently causing waves online:

-- Moviefone has launched the latest installment of Unscripted, featuring stars Josh Brolin and Elizabeth Banks discussing their new film W. using reader questions and some of their own. Additionally, above you'll find some newly-released art for the film. Heh.

-- After breaking up with Paramount, Dreamworks has officially found a new f*ck buddy in Universal, so says Variety. The two signed a seven-year worldwide distribution deal.

-- Darren Aronofsky's The Fighter looks to be in trouble. Now that the writer-director is working hard on that Robocop remake, seems this other flick is being neglected. Brad Pitt has apparently dropped out, and Mark Wahlberg -- who's been training for the role for over a year -- doesn't seem to know the film's current status. All that being said, Slashfilm claims their scouting locations in Mass.

-- A few photos of Mel Gibson on the set of Edge of Darkness have appeared online, most of which show the man going full-Diddy, forcing some woman to hold an umbrella so the sun doesn't, ya know, shine on the poor man. In case you forgot, this film marks Gibson's return to acting as a homicide detective investigating the death of his daughter. See image to the right, click to see enlarge. [via Crabbies Hollywood]

-- A theme park in the UK is actually moving forward with a ride based on the Saw films, called Saw - The Ride. I bet folks will just kill to get on it. HAR! Apparently, we're looking at a ride with "beyond vertical drop of 100-degree from a height of 100ft, as well as a rather sinister sounding "three inversions" to add to the fun." Who's down? [via IGN]

Guillaume Depardieu, the 37-year-old son of Gerard Depardieu, died today in Paris from a bout of acute pneumonia. Depardieu, who's starred in upwards of 20 films, struggled with drugs and drinking over the years.

A few new images of Samuel L. Jackson and the late Bernie Mac in the new film Soul Men have arrived in the Cinematical inbox. Check them out in the gallery below.