MarleyAndMe Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Gran Torino's expansion into wide release, plus strong openings for The Unborn and Bride Wars, combined for a surprisingly robust early January weekend at the box office.

With Gran Torino, Warner Bros. appears to have pulled off a genuinely successful platform release -- which isn't easy (though perhaps somewhat easier when your movie is a populist crowdpleaser). The film crept along in limited release for four weeks before expanding to 2800 screens this weekend for a cool $29 million. Next week, Defiance will attempt a similar coup, and we'll see what happens; my guess is that it won't play nearly as well.

Bride Wars and The Unborn essentially tied for second place with around $21 million each. Both did well, which is not a huge shock; the obligatory January horror film tends to be easy money, and Bride Wars pretty much matched the precedent set by 27 Dresses last January. And Screen Gems found an audience for its African-American-led drama Not Easily Broken, which did an okay $5.6 million on just over 700 screens.

The first real post-holiday weekend was rough on the holdovers, which, with the exception of Slumdog Millionare, pretty uniformly took hits of 50% or more. Unsurprisingly, Marley & Me remains the biggest winner of the holiday season; it should top out around $140 million. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, meanwhile, is hoping to hold on for long enough to get a boost when the Oscar nominations come out.

The full top 10 after the jump.

I will keep it brief this week, as the box office took a break -- at least as far as new releases are concerned -- for the first weekend of the new year.

Marley & Me maintained its lead on Adam Sandler's Bedtime Stories, despite the latter holding up a bit better. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button's staying power doesn't seem terribly impressive, as it took a tumble comparable to the other big Christmas releases. All else equal, it looks like it will end up at around $110 million. If it gets a slew of Oscar nominations on the 22nd, that could change things.

Slumdog Millionare didn't expand this weekend, but saw a 10% bump in ticket sales anyhow. That's because it's great and everyone loves it.

That's it. I said I'd keep it brief. Here's the full top 10:

1 - Marley & Me (Fox) - $24.05 ($6,862) - $106.51
2 - Bedtime Stories (Sony) - $20.32 ($5,515) - $85.35
3 - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Paramount) - $18.40 ($9.036) - $79.01
4 - Valkyrie (MGM/UA) - $14.04 ($5,055) - $60.69
5 - Yes Man (Warner Bros.) - $13.85 ($4,033) - $79.41
6 - Seven Pounds (Sony) - $10.00 ($3,626) - $60.04
7 - The Tale of Despereaux (Universal) - $7.02 ($2,271) - $43.74
8 - Doubt (Miramax) - $5.03 ($3,909) - $18.73
9 - The Day the Earth Stood Still (Fox) - $4.85 ($2,075) - $74.30
10 - Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight) - $4.77 ($7,794) - $28.78

Numbers courtesy of Box Office Mojo

Next week sees the first official 2009 releases: Bride Wars and the David S. Goyer horror film The Unborn go wide, while Not Easily Broken opens on 600 screens.

Christmas fell on a Thursday this year, leading to a very lucrative four-day weekend for all but one of the Christmas Day openers.

The pattern has always been to open one, maybe two big films around Christmas. This year we got five. Marley & Me was the best family option, and led the pack with $51.7 million over the long weekend, setting a Christmas Day record in the process. Good word-of-mouth is likely -- the audience reaction at the showing I saw can only be described as "epic." I think I may have actually caught some inanimate objects crying toward the end. Scarves, handbags, etc.

Adam Sandler's Bedtime Stories was next, underperforming slightly with $38.6 million. Sandler is somewhat untested in the PG family film arena, but I had expected Bedtime Stories to land somewhere in the vicinity of Click, which grossed $40 million on a three-day weekend in June. Bedtime Stories' $28 million three-day is the lowest for a film headlined by Sandler since Eight Crazy Nights in 2002, or if you think that doesn't count, since Little Nicky in 2000. Of course since Bedtime Stories opened on a Thursday, using the three-day number isn't quite fair. In any event, the fact that Marley took off certainly didn't help.

The third-place, $39 million finish for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a draw. That the heady, nearly three-hour drama was able to compete in this marketplace is surely a relief to Paramount, but the movie is so expensive ($150 million) that people were probably hoping for more. On the other hand, $30 million for Valkyrie -- which people had written off as a stinker after some release date shuffling and an upswing in general Tom Cruise negativity -- is cause for some high-fiving at MGM/UA.

I can't vouch for John Grogan's 2005 best-selling memoir, Marley & Me, in which owning a yellow lab helped the journalist (Owen Wilson) and his wife (Jennifer Aniston) tolerate any number of trials and tribulations that came their way -- many of which could be chalked up to the carnage-prone canine himself. I suspect that, unlike their on-screen counterparts, the Grogans actually showed some indications of aging after thirteen years and three kids. I doubt that John had a perpetual bachelor of a best bud (Eric Dane) who lingered around to both knock and envy his marriage with convenient doses of sarcasm and handsomeness. I question that the couple could own a picturesque Pennsylvania estate on just one reporter's salary. But I'm fairly sure that both the book and the film shared a common goal -- to make its audience sit, stay, laugh, cry, and then get on with their lives -- and at those modest aspirations, the movie version pretty much succeeds.

The pre-Christmas weekend was good to Jim Carrey, Will Smith and an animated mouse. The rest of the top five was filled out by holdovers from previous weeks, including Four Christmases in its fourth week of release. Here's the top five:

1. Yes Man: $18.2 million
2. Seven Pounds: $14.8 million
3. The Tale of Despereaux: $10.1 million
4. The Day the Earth Stood Still: $9.9 million
5. Four Christmases: $7.7 million

Santa is leaving five presents under the tree for movie fans. Whether they contain coal or a GI Joe with Kung Fu Grip remains to be seen. All five of these are opening on Thursday, Christmas day, rather than the usual Friday.

Bedtime Stories
What's It All About: Adam Sandler stars in this comedy about a man who realizes that the fanciful tales he's telling his niece and nephew are coming true.
Why It Might Do Well: This seems tailor-made for people who liked Sandler's 2006 film Click which had a $40 million opening weekend and went on to earn $237 million worldwide.
Why It Might Not Do Well: Rottentomatoes.com is currently rating the film 21% rotten.
Number of Theaters: 3,500
Prediction: $36 million

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
What's It All About: Brad Pitt stars in a film based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald story about a man who is born at the age of 80 and ages in reverse.
Why It Might Do Well: Mr. Pitt carries some serious box office clout, the trailer looks intriguing and Rottentomatoes.com give the film 78%.
Why It Might Not Do Well: It is to laugh.
Number of Theaters: 2,900
Prediction: $22 million

You really expect a movie headlined by Will Smith -- the consensus Biggest Movie Star in the World -- to at least break $20 million in its opening weekend. You'd have to go back to 2001's Ali to find one that didn't. Instead, Seven Pounds -- poorly reviewed and marketed to emphasize the central mystery in a way that turned out mystifying -- played second fiddle to Jim Carrey's Yes Man, pulling in $16 million to Yes Man's $18.1 million.

The Seven Pounds result is actually not terribly surprising, even given the Will Smith factor -- the movie is a morose downer, with none of the uplifting, holiday-appropriate draw of 2006's affable The Pursuit of Happyness (another Smith-Gabriele Muccino collaboration), and the people looking for that sort of thing have a lot to choose from this time of year, most of it carrying more cred. I'm a bit more taken aback by Yes Man's relatively weak opening. For a high-concept Jim Carrey comedy, opening a good three weeks after the last big light-hearted offering, $18 million is uninspiring. It's in the same ballpark as Fun with Dick and Jane, opening around the same time three years ago, but that one went up against three other comedies opening the same weekend, and was harder to market. I wonder if Jim Carrey's draw might be waning a bit.

I read the last hundred pages of Marley & Me at the counter of a neighborhood diner. Waiters and busboys and cooks milled around in front of me; fellow customers chomped on burgers to my left and my right. It was with around forty pages to go that I had the mortifying realization that I was crying. Sitting there in full view of what seemed at that moment to be all of San Francisco, reading a bright red book with a Labrador retriever puppy on the cover, tears streamed from my eyes.

Now, I won't try to sell you on the idea that Marley & Me is a great book. I can't even, in good conscience, recommend it as a "good book," which is what makes my teary diner incident so embarrassing. It's a sappy, sometimes shameless, thoroughly unremarkable memoir, consisting mostly of strained attempts to extract life lessons from mischievous-dog anecdotes. But there's something in it that pushes a certain button in those of us who melt at the sight of a grinning, tail-wagging canine. You know who you are. You may have wept watching My Dog Skip.

This week I'm taking a look at trailers chosen purely on the basis of how much they caught my eye.

Marley and Me
What caught my attention here was the idea that Owen Wilson is yet again playing a man wrestling with his inability to grow up, kind of like he did in Wedding Crashers and You Me and Dupree. Is this a groove or a rut? This time out Wilson is playing a married man who is unsure about whether or not he's ready to be a father, so he and his wife (played by Jennifer Aniston) test the parental waters by getting a dog. There's lots of cute doggie hijinx on display here, but between the Beethoven flashbacks and the fact that I've yet to see a really good Jennifer Aniston movie, I think I'll be passing on this one.

Sunshine Cleaning
In this indie comedy, two down on their luck sisters launch a business in which they clean up after crime scenes and untimely deaths. It's no one's dream job, but I can see there being a market for it. This is being touted as coming from the producers of Little Miss Sunshine, and one of that film's stars (Alan Arkin) appears here as the sisters' father. We've got some laughs and endearing characters here and there's a scene with Amy Adams lounging fetchingly in her underwear. I'll be watching for this one. Check out Kim's review of the film.

Fox has not had a good year -- and as with most drama-filled issues, they really have only themselves to blame. Variety points out that they were the only studio this summer that didn't have a $100 million domestic earner. What they did have was a lot of widely-derided flops like The Happening, Space Chimps, and Meet Dave. They also had films that might have done well, had they chosen to actually sell them, like The X-Files: I Want to Believe. They were also dealt a bit of bad luck when it came to X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which was supposed to come out this summer, making it the greatest superhero year ever, but was delayed due to Hugh Jackman's commitment to Australia. (A film which the studio is really hoping bails them out come fall, along with Marley and Me.)

Faced with so much failure and drama, what is a studio to do? Well, turn to superheroes, of course! As you read this, they're holding strategy meetings to dust off or create some new franchises off their comic book properties. They're looking at more X-Men spinoffs, including a young X-Men project that might just be X-Men First Class. They're also looking at giving Deadpool his own movie -- which seems a no-brainer when you have Ryan Reynolds playing him in Wolverine. Why, they're even looking at reviving Daredevil. (Frank Miller and Jason Statham, call on line two.) It's enough to wind up any Marvel fan.

Continued after the jump...

No, I'm not talking about Paul McCartney and Wings' "Venus and Mars" (though that is a pretty awesome tune). I suppose you would be hard pressed to find a movie with no romantic angle at all, but these five trailers focus specifically on male/female relationships.

Nights in Rodanthe
No, this doesn't have anything to do with that radioactive pterodactyl occasionally seen hanging out with Godzilla (that's Rodan to the uninitiated). Actually this one (which Erik first posted about here) stars Richard Gere as a doctor on his way to reconcile with his son. His trip takes an unexpected turn when he begins a love affair with an innkeeper whose loveless marriage is on the skids. Christopher Meloni plays the estranged husband, which doesn't seem all that different from his role on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. It looks like a competent production, but it just reeks of Bridges of Madison County. There may be something worthwhile here, but it's not my cup of tea.

He's Just Not That Into You
If nothing else, the cast of this adaptation of the novel by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo will make you sit up and take notice. Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Connelly, Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Aniston, Ben Affleck, and Justin Long star with Barrymore also producing. The film follows several interconnecting stories, with the trailer showing us several romantic missteps that could easily come from any romantic comedy, but the cast is so top-notch that I find myself wanting to see more. This one hits theaters on October 24. Here's Elisabeth's take on the trailer.