MonstersVsAliens Tagged Articles at Cinematical

In honor of this week's release of DreamWork's Monsters vs Aliens on both DVD and Blu-ray, we measly humans here at Cinematical have decided to wade through the hordes of monsters and or aliens in kid friendly films to find the cream of the closet-dwelling, slime-dripping, child-eating, smile-inducing crop of inhuman lovables. In doing so it has occurred to me just how hard it is for a film to make an iconic character for children.

Sure, it's easy to make something marketable for kids, but to make monstrous and unique characters for children to cherish into adulthood, not unlike the mutated heroes of MvA, takes a lot of talent.

E.T.
I have no reason to lie to you. I'm a 24-year-old man and E.T. still scares me. He has ever since I was a wee little lad. I can't pinpoint the moment that instilled such a ridiculous fear of everyone's favorite horticulturist from outer space, but I think it's a combination of two scenes. The first being when ET tries to phone home and inadvertently causes hurricane winds, flying saw blades, and me in the fetal position. Then we have the seemingly innocent visitor gray, shriveled and dying in the creek bed, looking like the specter of death to a frightened child like me.

My kindertrauma aside, I can't help but respect the terrifying little dude. He holds a special little place in my heart, even if it's in a deep, dark recess that makes me long for my blanky,

No surprises in the top spot: Monsters vs. Aliens handily took the weekend, its $58 million gross comparing favorably with previous Dreamworks Animation openings -- especially considering that it opened in March. The only Dreamworks films to open stronger bowed over the summer or during the holiday rush, and Monsters vs. Aliens had the third highest spring opening ever. It has no new family-oriented competition next week, so it should hold up pretty well at least until Hannah Montana comes along on April 10th.

I'm also pretty impressed with the $23 million second-place start for the non-event that is The Haunting in Connecticut -- those who've seen it know that it's a low-key, mournful little horror film that barely even merits the "horror" badge. It's the year's second-best start for a horror offering, and it should hold up better than Friday the 13th, which holds the title. Everyone be impressed with Lionsgate's ability to launch a horror flick.

Also, everyone point and laugh at Fox, which vomited the John Cena/Renny Harlin collaboration 12 Rounds onto 2,300 screens and has $5.3 million to show for it. That's about $2 million below 2006's Cena vehicle, The Marine. WWE Films has yet to have even a moderate hit without The Rock in it, and The Rock -- excuse me, Dwayne Johnson -- has long gone his own way.

A bit more, and the full top 10, after the jump.

Twelve years ago, they said it couldn't be done. When James Cameron's Titanic got pushed back from a planned summer 1997 release date to the late fall, on top of multiple reports that the budget was the biggest ever, it was commonly thought that the film would never make its money back, that it would break the studios involved, and that Cameron's career was finished.

Cameron returned to the director's chair for Avatar, his long-awaited 3-D science fiction drama, due in December, and it looks like it will be a watershed movie. An upbeat article on 3-D in Time Magazine casually mentions that the budget has exceeded $300 million, which would make it the most expensive movie ever made. [* Time has now updated the article; see below.] No less an authority than Steven Spielberg "predicts it will be the biggest 3-D live-action film ever," which sounds great, until you realize that very few 3-D live-action films have been made recently. Box Office Mojo lists Spy Kids 3D: Game Over as the top-grossing live-action 3-D release in the US ($111 million) with Journey to the Center of the Earth close behind ($107 million). Avatar will have to do much better to have a prayer of making back its budget.

The biggest concern is that fewer theaters than anticipated have been converted to digital. In the Time Magazine article, Jeffrey Katzenberg of Dreamworks Animation "predicts that more than 2,000 theaters will be 3-D-ready by this week," just in time for the release of his studio's Monsters vs. Aliens on March 27.

What are your impressions of the new, improved 3-D? Did you see My Bloody Valentine or Coraline in 3-D? Will you seek out Monsters vs. Aliens in 3-D -- and pay a premium price -- or settle for 2-D? Will Avatar make or break 3-D?

* UPDATE: Thanks to commenter Eric for pointing out that Time has updated their article, which now adds at the end: "The original version of this story misstated the cost of the film Avatar as being in excess of $300 million. The correct figure is in excess of $200 million."