X-Men the Last Stand Tagged Articles at Cinematical

It is of course impossible to say whether the much-discussed work print leak damaged Wolverine's box office take, nor whether Fox's cockamamie strategy of tacking on different mid-credits codas to different prints of the film helped matters. All we can conclude is that if piracy hurt, it didn't hurt that much (which really has been the refrain for the movie industry all along), since I don't think too many people will be unhappy with an $87 million first weekend. For those keeping score, that's well ahead of X-Men, marginally ahead of Bryan Singer's X2, and roughly $15 million behind Brett Ratner's X-Men: The Last Stand. Wolverine is not likely to hold up well, but it's hard to imagine a scenario where it doesn't get to $200 million domestic. And after all the angst, that's a victory.

One thing to consider is what this means for the straight action model of the comic book movie. I didn't dislike Wolverine like a lot of people did, but it undoubtedly did away with the nuance, intricacy and character focus that we've gotten used to seeing in major comic book adaptations. I bet it's much easier to make a Wolverine than a Iron Man or an X2 or a Watchmen, and it seems not to be much less financially rewarding.

I very much enjoyed not watching Ghosts of Girlfriends Past this weekend, and it seems so did a bunch of other people. The Matthew McConaughey romantic comedy picked up $15.3 million, which isn't bad, but puts the film way behind the last three identical Matthew McConaughey romantic comedies. And the 3D-animated Battle for Terra, while not a Delgo-level bust, couldn't break the top 10 and ended up with just over $1 million on around 1,200 screens. It's tough out there for animated features not bankrolled and marketed by huge studios.

The weekend's top 10 after the jump.

Love him or hate him, you've got to hand it to Brett Ratner for keeping his career in motion. Variety brings word that the hustling filmmaker plans to take his Rat Entertainment company from New Line, where it first settled in 1996, to a first-look deal with Paramount Pictures. Ratner says the departure of New Line execs Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne in February convinced him it was time to move on. At Paramount, Ratner will probably get bigger budgets and executives more receptive to his blockbuster-ready concepts. Stating the obvious, Ratner told Variety he "will not be pitching art films. I want to make major tentpole movies." You don't say?

Unless you're Scott Foundas, you probably balk at the idea of more Ratner movies populating the mainstream film scene, but the guy does fit the proper archetype of the classic Hollywood powerhouse. A modern day Sammy Glick, he knows how to make movies that bring out the audiences, whether or not they're any good. But maybe that determination means that, one day, Ratner will make a lot of great movies. His planned Hugh Hefner biopic sounds promising -- or at least, appropriate.

Still, that's a little ways off. Encouraged by his experience with X-Men: The Last Stand, Ratner decided he wanted to work on a new superhero franchise, so he's adapting Valiant Comics' Harbinger. Also in his queue: Beverly Hills Cop 4, The Incredible Shrinking Man and The Boys From Brazil. Do these projects get anyone excited? Anyone at all?

Thanks primarily to the massive appeal of both Ice Age: The Meltdown and X-Men: The Last Stand, Fox International on June 9 became the first studio to pass $1 billion in international sales this year, reaching that mark in record-breaking time. Industry-watchers are mucho impressed by the studio's strength -- crossing that threshold only six months into the year is a sign of serious strength, apparently, particularly "in today's highly competitive international marketplace." Fox won the race to $1 billion last year as well, but that success came nowhere near this fast. Of course, when you've got one movie -- Ice Age 2 -- pulling in $441 freaking million, that gives you a pretty good push towards that billion dollar goal.

In addition to Ice Age 2, major profit-drivers for the studio thus far have been X3 ($160.1 million), Walk the Line ($64.8 million) and, troublingly, The Pink Panther and Big Momma's House 2, which made $74.4 million and $64.3 million respectively. Yikes. Yet to come from Fox this year are such potential moneymakers as My Super Ex-Girlfriend, The Devil Wears Prada, Night At The Museum and, sigh, Garfield 2.

Despite a critical reception that was lukewarm at best, The Break-Up did shockingly good business this weekend, outpacing even studio expectations by over 30% on its way to an estimated total of $38.1 million. Dropping way off from its record-setting first weekend but holding on to the second spot was X-Men: The Last Stand with $34.4 million, which pushed its total domestic gross to $175.7 million in just 10 days (it took X2 a week longer to reach that mark). In the third spot this weekend was the quietly ass-kicking Over the Hedge; though the movie cuts its exposure by 100 screens, its take of $20.1 million was down less than 25% from last weekend.

At the other end of the chart was An Inconvenient Truth (AKA that Al Gore movie of which you may have heard) which continued to do stunning business on just a handful of screens. Though it was only in 77 theaters this weekend, the movie nevertheless made over $1 million, good enough to make it the ninth-biggest earner over the past three days. Like last weekend, the film's per-screen average (over $17,000/screen this week) dwarfed the earnings of every other release.

The full top 10 is after the jump.

Over at Film Threat, Shane Burridge has a rather entertaining piece up on the perplexing way that American movie titles are renamed in Chinese. Burridge breaks it down thusly: when renaming American films with Chinese names, translators tend to use one of these methods:

• The "come up with a name that reflects the DVD cover" method, by which Finding Nemo became The Big Fish Is Going to Eat the Little Fish;
• The "sounds kinda like this" method, by which Titanic morphed into Tai Tan Ne Ke;
• The "enhanced translation" path, which leads to, say, Mr. Bean becoming Stupid Mr. Bean;
• The "did the translator actually watch this film?" method, in which Deliverance somehow became Four Brave Men Passing Through Rapids and Dangerous Shoals;
• And, of course, the ever-reliable literal translation, such as The Little Mermaid becoming The Romance of Human and Mermaid.

Not only is Burridge's piece a funny read (the bit about the Ass-Kicking Ketchup almost made me snort peppermint tea out my nose -- in a very lady-like way, of course), it's inspired us here at Cinematical to give you yet another reason to win a snazzy, spiffy Cinematical t-shirt. Here's all you gotta do: Come up with the best Chinese translation of any of the following summer movie titles, using any one of the methods listed above to create your translation:

• Mission: Impossible: 3
• X-Men: The Last Stand
• Poseidon
• My Super Ex-Girlfriend
• Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Mens' Chest

Leave your best entries in the comments. If your brain juices are really flowing and you feel super-creative and inspired, you can enter more than one, but we'll only pick one winner. You have until 11:59PM EDT on Thursday, May 11 to submit your entry. Winner will be announced by Monday. Ready ... set ... GO!

When it comes to summer family films, who, we figured, is better to ask than kids? So we gathered our junior film critic crew in Seattle ( AKA my kids): Neve (9), Jaxon (6), Veda (4.5) and Luka (2.5), and asked them to tell us what they think about the summer kiddie-flick lineup, based on the trailers. We watched each trailer two times, and I recorded their reactions and asked a few questions about what they thought, and which movies they're most excited about seeing. Here's what the junior squad has to say about the summer family lineup. (Note: I included Superman Returns and X-3 because a lot of families will take their kids to these flicks, or at least watch the "family" version of X-3 on pay-per-view. Also, the crew flatly refused to watch the trailer for Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties, so you're on your own on that one).

 

All sorts of groovy insider stuff happens at ShoWest. This year, among other things, attendees got to see Cars (Most of the reviews basically say "Hey, better than I expected!", which is faint praise indeed.), hang out with the great Dakota Fanning, and see a big chunk of new Superman Returns footage. While no one has yet helped us out by offered a full, bootlegged version of Cars online (not that we'd ever endorse such a thing), a slightly shaky pirate with a crappy camera (phone?) did record some new X3 footage, as well as the Superman reel that played at a Brandon Routh tribute (Yeah, now they're honoring people who haven't yet done anything. I'm expecting my Oscar any day now.), which offers a glipse at the movie.

While the Routh video consists mostly of a lot of people saying things like "We love Brandon!" and "Oh my God, he's just the bestest Superman ever!", the X3 clip is all footage from the movie - and it's very Wolverine heavy, if you're into that sort of thing. Again, the quality of this stuff is pretty bad, but until we all get to go to neat industry events, it's the best we're going to get.

I'd be willing to bet that the ratings for last night's episode of 24 were even higher than usual, what with every fanboy in the country tuning in for the big premiere of the X-Men: The Last Stand trailer (most of them probably prepared to go kill Brett Ratner if the thing was as awful as they feared). So, is it awful? Well, not completely - I'm pretty convinced that, with millions of dollars to make what is basically a 90 second movie, it's almost impossible to have it not be visually impressive. But it strikes me that about 98% of the trailer walks a very, very fine line between powerfully affecting and profoundly silly. Kelsey Grammer with blue skin and fur, wearing a suit? To me, that's hilarious. And the army of mutants? I'm sorry, but it really looked absurd, at least in dramatic long-shot. Also, the one glimpse of Juggernaut is just as silly as the photos led us to believe. That said, however, Ian McKellen is a good enough actor that almost everything he says is convincing, and his scenes keep the trailer from veering completely into "oh dear" territory. While it's true that, as someone who thinks the X-Men movies are simply fluffy fun, I can't react to the trailer with a deep understand of the characters and events depicted there, the fact is that I'm much more representative of the general public than those who can.

It's too early yet (I'm writing this at about 8am EST) for there to be too many reactions around the web, so it's be great to hear from some of you (fanboys and non-fanboys) about this one - are you guys are horrified as you expected, or has Ratner been (ever so slightly) redeemed?