Box Office 11/30/09: Moon Sinks, Carol Sings
An inauspicious opening for Viggo Mortensen in The Road, at this week's #10
The astonishing performance of The Twilight Saga: New Moon came to something of a halt over the Thanksgiving weekend, recording the largest dollar decline on record for a film in its second weekend. Of course, all things being equal it still won the holiday, with $42.90M for a 10 day total of $230.90M, becoming the most successful vampire film ever released.
Sports-themed heart-tugger The Blind Side added 30 theaters and $40.11M, for a 10 day total of $100.23M (not bad for an investment of $29M), while 2012 sank 33.2% after adding 36 theaters, bringing in $17.65M for a not too disastrous $138.45M in its third week of release. At #4, Travolta and Williams showed no new tricks and Old Dogs launched with $16.89M ($24.22M for the full five days), while A Christmas Carol dropped 565 theaters but increased by 28.4%, pulling in $15.75M for a total of $104.92M - it has a hold on the IMAX screens until December 18th when James Cameron's Avatar will no doubt leave all other films weeping in its wake.
At #6, Ninja Assassin opened with $13.31M ($21.19 in five days), followed by Planet 51, which held on well, down just 16.8% with $10.21M, but a running total of $28.48 is still a long way shy of its $70M budget. Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire, declined steeply with $7.08 at #8 and this week's big disappointment is Fantastic Mr Fox at #9, which added 2,029 theaters, but only managed to pull in $6.95M for a total of $10,024.
At #10, The Road debuted on 111 screens, but post-apocalyptic art-house didn't strike a holiday chord and it could only scare up $1.50M ($1.97M over five days), though it did have the highest per-screen average ($13,534) of films playing over 100 theaters.
Disney's return to old-school animation, The Princess and the Frog opened in two theaters and received the highest per screen rating, with $393,095, for a total of $786,190 and the #18 slot.
This coming weekend sees a dearth of genre releases, with heist thriller Armored, from Vacancy (and upcoming Predators) director Nimród Antal, Jim Sheridan's drama Brothers, Robert DeNiro family holiday film Everybody's Fine, Jason Reitman's eagerly awaited Up in the Air, and the final screenplay of Waitress writer Adrienne Shelley, Serious Moonlight. The sole genre release is horror 'comedy' Transylmania from National Lampoon's Hillenbrand brothers, which arrives just in time to appear on the year's Top 10 lists.
Keep an eye on the UK also, as The Descent: Part 2 opens against Paranormal Activity in its second week (it took £3.59M/$5.98M this weekend) and New Moon in its third (total so far of £20.32M/$33.80M).
Box Office 11/16/09: End of the World Wins Big
To nobody's surprise, Roland Emmerich's $200M 2012 ruled the weekend box office. The disaster-meister's latest dollop of CGI destructo-porn raked in $65.2M, a little behind his biggest opener, the global cooling thriller The Day After Tomorrow ($68.7M in 2004), and also trailing last year's opening of Quantum of Solace on the same weekend ($67.5M).
A Christmas Carol held on well at #2, with only a 26% drop from its slightly disappointing opening, with $22.3M for a 10-day total of $63.27M. This year's other "little film that could" Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire pulled in a remarkable $5.87M on 174 screens ($33,762 per screen, which is good but not good enough to take the average-per-screen pole position) to take the #3 spot, while Men Who Stare at Goats battled poor reviews with another $5.86M, for a running total of $23.03M.
Michael Jackson's This Is It enters week three of its strictly limited two week run (do distributors have no shame?) with a 61% drop (perhaps audiences thought it was no longer playing) for $5.07M and a total of $67.19M. Widely derided, The Fourth Kind plummeted 62% to #6 with $4.60M, bringing its 10-day total to $20.44M (budget undisclosed). Both Couples Retreat (which cost an inexplicable $70M) and Paranormal Activity ($11–15,000 depending on who you believe) both crossed the $100M barrier this week, each pulling in around $4M for the weekend.
Law Abiding Citizen slipped one place to #9, with $3.79M and The Box (reportedly the recipient of some of the worst exit poll reviews in some time) just managed to stay inside the top 10 with $3.15M for a 10-day total of $13.17M. Richard Curtis's Pirate Radio managed a weak $2.90M in 882 theaters at #11, while Where the Wild Things Are is proving tenacious at #12, with $2.41M, making its total $73.44M in just over four weeks.
Fantastic Mr Fox (read my review here) opened small in just four theaters, but was by far the biggest winner on a per-screen basis, pulling in an average of $66,475, over twice the total of Precious. Expect this to do well with hipster parents over Thanksgiving.
This coming weekend sees the opening of tween juggernaut The Twilight Saga: New Moon; Spanish/English/US Pixar-wannabe Planet 51, a limited release (finally) for John Woo's Red Cliff (edited down to one 148-minute film from the original two-part epic); and Werner Herzog's ecstatically received festival favorite Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, with a back-on-form Nicolas Cage.
Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
Country: USA
Production Company: Twentieth Century Fox presents in association with Indian Paintbrush and Regency Enterprises an American Empirical picture
Producers: Allison Abbate, Scott Rudin, Wes Anderson, Jeremy Dawson
Executive Producers: Steven M Rales, Arnon Milchan
Director: Wes Anderson
Screenplay: Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, based on the book by Roald Dahl
Editors: Ralph Foster, Stephen Perkins
Cinematographer: Tristan Oliver
Music: Alexandre Desplat
Production Designer: Nelson Lowry
Visual Effects: Tim Ledbury, Liz Chan, Tom Collier/LipSync Post, Hugh Macdonald/Stranger
Character Design: Félicie Haymoz
Animation Director: Mark Gustafson/Indian Paintbrush
Puppet Fabrication: Andy Gent/Mackinnon & Saunders
Sound: David Evans, Jacob Ribicoff
Titles: Look Effects
Length: 87 mins
Budget: $40M
Cast: George Clooney (Mr Fox), Meryl Streep (Mrs Felicity Fox), Jason Schwartzman (Ash), Bill Murray (Badger), Wally Wolodarsky (Kylie), Eric Anderson (Kristofferson), Michael Gambon (Franklin Bean), Willem Dafoe (Rat), Owen Wilson (Coach Skip), Jarvis Cocker (Petey), Wes Anderson (Weasel), Karen Duffy (Linda Otter), Robin Hurlstone (Walter Boggis), Hugo Guinness (Nathan Bunce), Helen McCrory (Mrs Bean), Roman Coppola (squirrel contractor), Brian Cox (Action 12 reporter), Adrien Brody (Field Mouse), Mario Batali (Rabbit)
Synopsis: Having given up a life of chicken stealing for a less exciting career in journalism, Mr Fox decides to move his family into a desirable residence that sits dangerously close to the farms of Boggis, Bunce and Bean. Bored with his new life he decides with the help of his sidekick, Kylie the vole, to rob the farmers on successive nights, but is unprepared for the extreme measures they will take to exact revenge. Measures that will mean the loss of his tail and his home and endanger the lives of his family and the entire local animal population.
Review: There's an exciting trend in children's animation (especially if, like me, you're the father of a one-year-old) – let's call it the "Post-Pixar Approach" – that takes a more sophisticated view of story-telling and credits children with greater emotional intelligence than is the recent norm. The approach, which has nothing to do with lazy post-modern allusions to the adult world, acknowledges that many of the elements we attempt to shield our children from – pain, violence, loneliness, and frustration – actually exist and can be managed.
This can be seen in such Pixar films as WALL•E (the best depiction of solitary life in outer space since Silent Running) and Up (that staggering opening sequence), and in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (described by Mark Kermode as a kid's film as re-imagined by David Lynch) and most recently and controversially in Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are. While this is entirely welcome, it does mean that the stage is set for someone to make a personal project, lose sight of the target audience and fall flat on their arse (some would argue Jonze already accomplished this).
Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox is the first book that Wes Anderson remembers owning and he worked for 10 years to get it onto the screen, first with Henry Selick (animator of Dahl's James and the Giant Peach, as well as the charming creatures in Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), who had to leave to work on Coraline and eventually with himself as director, working with an animation team in England.
When reading about Anderson's films, the words that come up most often are "hermetic" and "detailed", exemplified in his best work, Rushmore (1998) and particularly The Royal Tanenbaums (2001), the story of a dysfunctional family of prodigies in a New York brownstone, subject to the fickle whims of a dominating, miscreant patriarch. Watching Anderson's carefully art-directed snow globes – with their matching adidas gear and perfectly-spaced Futura titles (Kubrick's favorite font), it's easy to see the appeal of a world where everything must be created from scratch, moved in minute increments and that ceases to exist beyond the periphery of the lens.
Beautifully executed in the warm, walnut tones of Fall, the design and animation of the stop-motion characters in Fantastic Mr Fox is flawless – the film consists of 61,920 stills, shot on a Nikon D3 camera to give the illusion of movement – and they fit snugly into the gorgeous world created for them. Anderson wrote the movie with Noah Baumbach (co-writer of The Life Aquatic and writer-director of The Squid and the Whale) while sitting in Dahl's study at the author's home in Buckinghamshire and they lifted many details - including the Fox family's oak tree home - from what they saw around them. Even the sound recordings were made in locations as close to their natural origins as is possible – George Clooney being recorded in his garden in Italy.
However it's this insularity that is the film's main flaw. Recently the anomalies in Anderson's work are what stand out in fussy, forgettable films - Selick's animation in The Life Acquatic, the unexpected death of a child in The Darjeeling Limited - and it's easy to bemoan the collaboration with Baumbach, who created the gratingly insufferable worlds of The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding. Anderson and Baumbach consistently keep the viewer at arms length, we're outsiders looking in at a universe entirely of their creation, populated with characters whose whimsical flaws only exist to serve the plot and bear little resemblance to real people.
Here, Mr Fox speaks like George Clooney playing himself in a Woody Allen film and his son, Ash, sounds like Jason Schwartzman in Darjeeling, never quite letting you forget who's behind the animation. Bill Murray also is just too much Bill and not enough Badger, with only Meryl Streep as Felicia Fox and Willem Dafoe as Fox's nemesis, Rat letting you forget the actor and believe the character.
Anderson has said that he wanted the film itself to be like a wild animal, not overly domesticated and free of focus group feedback telling him that the farmers shouldn't smoke and the action was too violent. It's a shame then that he doesn't let rip a little more - the packed Sunday afternoon screening I attended at the Empire, Leicester Square, London was well attended by the under-10s, but they remained respectful, rather than elated - happy to enjoy the spectacle but laughing only when the animals broke character at the dinner table, becoming feral as their food is served, or at the sight of vicious guard dogs, drugged and cross-eyed, falling out of frame.
And yet, for all its faults, this is still a film I hope my daughter loves one day. Even if brain sometimes overpowers heart, its a tale of the dangers of growing up (and not growing up), the lure of domestic life versus the pull of the wild, an urban fox who wishes he was a forest wolf, and it's a good story, well told. But mostly because somewhere in my shallow heart I hope that one day she'll be smart and sassy like Kathryn Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby (or at least Jennifer Jason Leigh in The Hudsucker Proxy) and because I want her to love films like this and WALL•E and My Neighbour Totoro, rather than Alvin and the Chipmunks. And, while I know that I will have to deal with whoever succeeds Miley Cyrus to the throne of Disney pop tart, I hope that some time in the future, five or six years from now, she'll watch Fantastic Mr Fox and ask me, "Daddy, what does "Kom-see, kom-sar mean?"". I'd quite like that.
Fantastic Mr Fox opened The Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival on October 15th and opens in limited release in the USA on November 13th, expanding for the Thanksgiving Holiday.
Marketing display of characters and sets, The Gap, Oxford Street, London.
