“Sweeney Todd (Dreamworks/Paramount) was down for a 3rd straight day [Thursday], falling to #9 with $2.23M and a $1,788 [per-theater average],” writes Steve Mason at Fantasy Moguls. “It is a film of undisputed brilliance, but it would have benefited from a platform rollout instead of the cash grab of a 1,788 location run. The studio took a “bait and switch” approach, essentially “tricking” younger moviegoers into seeing a horror film, which turned out to be a Sondheim musical. The perception of commercial failure, along with the (literally) rivers of blood spilled in the movie may conspire to keep this one out of the Best Picture category (although director Tim Burton and star Johnny Depp seem like locks with plenty of attention in the technical categories as well). Also down for the 3rd consecutive day was the Oprah Winfrey-produced, Denzel Washington-directed The Great Debaters (Weinstein/MGM). This inspirational tale sank another 23% on Thursday to $1.6M and a PTA of $1,383 at its 1,164 locations. It seems that with limited commercial upside, a questionable Golden Globe nomination for Best Picture - Drama (c’mon, 7 nominees) and a more lauded Washington performance in American Gangster, Debaters is a non-starter in the Oscar race. Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (Paramount Vantage) suffered a 16% dip from its Wednesday PTA of nearly $34K at 2 locations, but the searing period drama still impressed with a stunning $28K per. With Daniel Day Lewis giving perhaps his best-ever performance, Blood is a guaranteed arthouse blockbuster. As a bonus, older men seem to love this movie, and that’s the key Oscar voting block. (Of course, No Country For Old Men (Miramax) has similar appeal, so that may open the Best Picture door for a more female-skewing movie like Atonement.) Two other Oscar contenders got nice bumps in business Thursday with both The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Miramax) and Persepolis up 16%. Diving Bell scripter Ronald Harwood and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski seem like Oscar nomination locks for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Cinematography respectively. Some degree of commercial success could nudge Julian Schnabel more firmly into the Best Director quintet, and it would also help Max Von Sydow in the Supporting Actor category. (Although, it seems that the Best Actor race is too crowded with too much pedigree for the remarkable Mathieu Amalric.) Meanwhile, Thursday’s PTA of about $3,000 at 7 locations can only help Persepolis for an Oscar nomination quinella of Best Foreign Language Film and Best Animated Feature.”
The day after Christmas is one of the biggest moviegoing days of the year, so it’s not a good sign when flicks that open on the normally quietier Christmas Eve show a drop in business the next day. But according to early Wednesday figures parsed by Steve Mason at Fantasy Moguls, that’s precisely what seems to have happened to three new titles. “Aliens vs. Predator: Requieum,” which opened with a bloody impressive $9.5 million on Tuesday, dropped a whopping 55 percent to $4.28 on Wednesday, Mase projects. Horror movies tend to be front-loaded, so more surprising was the even larger hemorrhage by the adult-skewing Jack Nicholson-Morgan Freeman dying old guys vehicle, which dropped a whopping 63 percent from Tuesday to Wednesday in limited release. Perhaps those predictions this would be Rob Reiner’s first hit in a decade were a tad premature. Mase says that on a per-theater basis, “The Bucket List” was the biggest day after Christmas drop since 2002, and “AVP” was No. 2. Ranking No. 4 on post-Christmas Day drops is the Oprah-produced “The Great Debaters,” which Mase projects slipped 42 percent, to $3.6 million and tenth place. The other Christmas Day opener, “The Water Horse,” was in ninth place on Wednesday with $2.4 million. “Juno” was in seventh place with $2.79 millon, just ahead of “Sweeney Todd” with $2.59 million, as the newcomers pushed “The Golden Compass” (No. 11) and “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” (No. 13) off the top-10 chart. In limited action, “There Will Be Blood” opened Wednesday at two theaters in NY and LA with a gushing $66,592.
Today is the 101st birthday of Oscar Levant (1906-1972), the musical enfant terrible who appeared regularly in films between 1929 and 1955, usually playing a thinly disguised version of his irascable self. He actually played his ascerbic self in “Rhapsody in Blue,” the misconceived biopic of his friend George Gershwin, and recorded what was for many years the most popular version of the title song. He also composed the scores for several obscure movies, and devised the mock opera sung by Boris Karloff’s voice double in “Charlie Chan at the Opera.” In the late 1950s and 1960s his neurotic ramblings and witticisms made him a popular guest on TV talk shows and wrote three books, the most popular being the autobiographical “Memoirs of an Amnesiac.” He appeared mainly in musicals, most notably in Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” as well as in “The Bandwagon,” but he assayed straight roles in “Humoresque” and “The Cobweb,” in which he was typecast as what was then known as a mental patient. Oscar was in a certain singer’s film debut “Romance on the High Seas,” which allowed him to famously boast later that “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.” More details on, and lots more hilarious quotes from, this remarkable character, a minor obsession of my adolescence, at the splendid The Picture Show Man.
As far as I’m concerned, the Best Actor race is over and they can give the thing to Daniel Day-Lewis, who delivers the best performance so far this century in “There Will Be Blood.” It opens today only on a single screen at the Lincoln Square, so expect lots of sellouts. Click above for my video review. If you haven’t had a few cups of coffee, you might want to go with my easier-to-take 3.5 star print review. Day-Lewis has swept most of the critics awards so far, as Helen Mirren did in ‘06. As I’ve said previously, I think the flick is too dark and challenging to get a Best Picture nomination, but I think Paul Thomas Anderson has a good shot at the Best Director nod for his singular vision.
It’s going to be an bumpy awards season on TV, my colleague Michael Starrreports today. The striking Writers Guild of America’s refusal to grant waivers has forced the Jan. 8 People’s Choice Awards to switch from a live ceremony to a series of pre-taped clips. And nobody knows at what point what will happen on the Jan. 13 Golden Globes — there are even rumors that NBC will pull the plug altogether, and the ceremonies, including (gasp!) the red carpet, will go un-televised. Which may well affect the Oscar race, since Globe acceptance speeches have become a form of auditioning for Oscar nominees. So far, the WGA has granted waivers only to the Jan. 27 Screen Actors Guild Awards (SAG has been very supportive of the strike) and for the Indie Spirit Awards on Feb. 23. But not for the Oscars, held the next night, though producer Gil Cates is literally vowing “the show will go on.” The first scheduled televised awards of the season are actually the Critics Choice Awards, scheduled to be presented Jan. 7 on VH1. I hear the Broadcast Film Critics Association — many of whose members belong to AFTRA — hasn’t even asked the WGA for a waiver on the assumption they won’t have problems with a show that’s traditionally unscripted. But will the WGA picket, and will stars feel comfortable showing up even if they don’t? That’s a vexing question that’s even confronting non-televised critics awards. The first of them is the annual dinner of the New York Film Critics Circle, which will give its awards out the night before the BFCA, on Sunday, January 6 at Spotlight in Times Square.
