All Pixar Has Left to Do Is Become Self-Aware and Nuclear Bomb Us All

Pixar continues its eerily strong success streak with its latest picture, about a floating house. Terminator is in trouble, while the Ben Stiller bubble has yet to pop. It probably never will. More »

Watchmen Shellacked on Second Weekend

Comic-book geeks can't turn movies into blockbusters, or at least that will be the lesson from Watchmen's spectacularly bad second week. Literally begging nerds to see the movie this weekend didn't work. More »

Gun-Wielding Madea Bravely Fends Off Be-Hotpanted Jonas Brothers

Good morning and happy, miserable Monday everyone. (Snow on the East, rain on the West). While you cower inside, away from the elements, ponder over the weekend box office report and wonder... why? More »

Discuss: Kirk Cameron Had the Biggest Indie-Film Hit of 2008

The early word on Kirk Cameron's Fireproof hinted that the religious-themed drama would pack a wallop at the specialty box office in late 2008. But $33 million? Holy Christ, indeed.

Five Lessons Learned From the 'Marley and Me' Box-Office Windfall

The Monday Morning Box Office looks basically the same as it did on Friday, with Marley and Me shocking everyone with a $51 million holiday frame. But what does its surprising success really mean?

'Twilight,' Dark Knight' Disappoint After Adjustment For Inflation, Reality

Among the year-end movie surveys bombing the landscape, few offer as rewarding a reality check as the one recapping 2008 as the Year of the Sucker.

Australia Can't Even Do Well In Australia

We hate to beat a dead kangaroo here, but that Australia is showing signs of becoming an epic flop. It's not even doing well in Australia! The country where it was filmed and takes place and was, we suspect, named after! Variety reports that the film has basically done good but not great business since it opened Down Under. Was it overhyped? Variety seems to think so: More »

'Four Christmases' Quadruples Your Forgettable-Holiday-Movie Experience

Fears that the R-word would keep audiences from the movies this weekend were unfounded, as the name "Reese Witherspoon" still proved an impressive multiplex draw. Have another helping of turkey-chip pancakes topped with cranberry syrup and a pat of yam, as we grind down to the last of the leftovers and run down the box office numbers:

Twilight: Laughed At By Youngs, Beloved By Olds

Twilight made a bamillion dollars this weekend! $70.6 million, to be exact. And while we tried to explain the whole phenomenon last week, the figures and demographics for this teen-falls-in-love-with-vampire horromance tell us all we need to know. Though the whole craze is mostly attributed to teens, a large swath of the film's audience was depressingly over 25, and the younger folks that did show up to ogle the specatcle found the whole thing, well, pretty silly. More »

Disney's Cable Ghetto Now Hollywood's Richest Blockbuster Incubator

Disney's back-ordered fleet of Brinks trucks had better arrive soon: High School Musical 3: Senior Year is tracking for a $38 million opening weekend, with Beverly Hills Chihuahua anticipating another $6 million in its fourth week of release. Those grosses would likely land the all-ages tandem together in the Top 5 at the box office — the first time two non-Pixar Disney titles have shared that space since 1994. Useless trivia? We think not — and we aren't alone. More »

Will Kirk Cameron Be The Surprise King of The Box Office This Weekend?

Actually, no he won’t. But the former Growing Pains star and born-again nutjob does have a movie coming out called Fireproof, and according to the LA Times it “has been No. 1 in advance sales on movie ticketing site Fandango.com with 31% of this week's business, albeit in a slow marketplace— even outpacing sales for the big-budget popcorn thriller Eagle Eye, starring heartthrob Shia LaBeouf.” How in the name of Boner Stabone is this possible? More »

Small in Japan: It was bound to happen eventually: We've finally found the one country in the world where The Dark Knight is underperforming. Japanese moviegoers have reportedly bowed out of the global phenomenon, with TDK hovering around the equivalent of $8.7 million in its second week of release. In comparison, observers point to the film's $14 million take during the same frame in Korea, as well as Batman Begins' own $14 million Japanese opening three years ago. Why the plunge? Competition from Hayao Miyazaki's blockbuster Ponyo on the Cliff — currently sitting at $93 million after only a month in theaters — hasn't helped. Nor has its unrelenting heaviness, says one critic: "Japanese movie fans expect such films to be fun and action-packed, for the hero to be attractive, for the villain to be loud and outrageous, and for the movie itself to be easy to understand and light." At least that should brighten post-Hulk spirits at Marvel: Iron Man opens in Japan on Sept. 20. [Film Junk via /film]

Why Do The Spaniards Love 'Zohan'?

There's something about Zohan. The overseas box office had been buoyed recently by a flurry of well-received summer releases, the most confounding being Spain's love affair with Adam Sandler's You Don't Mess With the Zohan. What, exactly, is it about a crimping-iron-wielding Mossad agent that has locals skipping siestas to catch the comedy two, sometimes three times? We sent the data to the Defamer Foreign Box Office Analysis Dept. More »

Steve Coogan or Rainn Wilson: Who Had the Worse Weekend?

It's probably asking a lot for a Monday, but pretend for just a second that you're Focus Features, Universal's mini-major offshoot and the folks who last January made the single biggest buy in the history of the Sundance Film Festival: Hamlet 2, which sneaked into Park City at the last minute and left 10 days later with lukewarm (at best) reviews and a check for $11 million. So imagine your signature was on that check, and imagine how much weight you'll lose this week as your appetite plunges with Hamlet 2's box-office prospects: $435,000 on 103 screens, averaging $4,223 per for one of the most profound festival flops of the decade — not to mention the film that bumps Steve Coogan back to ensemble/supporting-class in American movies. More »

'Tropic Thunder' Offensive Repelled at Box Office with $7.5 Million Opening

Attribute it to whatever phenomena you want — the potheads stayed away, the groupies weren't interested, RetardGate '08 — but Tropic Thunder opened softer than planned on Wednesday. Ben Stiller's Hollywood satire pulled in around $7.5 million, prompting observers to downgrade their weekend estimates that should nevertheless keep the film in first place above Star Wars: The Clone Wars and The Dark Knight this weekend. The turnout looked that much worse when compared to that of Pineapple Express, which drew more than $12 million last Wednesday — the best midweek, R-rated comedy opening in ages. More »

Smokin': Those early estimates that pegged Pineapple Express for a superb $10 million Wednesday opening may have turned out to be conservative. Another box-office observer sends word that the year's biggest stoner comedy/Franco-sex-appeal testimonial in fact raked in $12.15 million in its first day — a fairly staggering figure for an R-rated comedy. Bowing on a Wednesday. In the first week of August. The revised tracking also suggests Express has enough momentum to wrest box-office superiority from The Dark Knight this weekend, but we're not so sure: The same tracking suggested The Mummy 3 would have similar success last weekend (it didn't), and in any case, Express will need all of its five-day numbers — as much as $45 million by some estimates — just to beat Dark Knight's three-day figure. Check out tomorrow morning's Defamer Attractions column, where we'll call our official shot. [Fantasy Moguls]

BREAKING BATNEWS: Word just over the transom says The Dark Knight has broken $400 million in domestic box office in just its 18th day of release — a new record surpassing Shrek 2's previous 43-day milestone. Defamer sources attribute yesterday's nudge to Al Gorman, a 44-year old plumber from Columbus, Ohio, in whose name Warner Bros. commemorated "the Gorman Seat" at the AMC Lennox Town Center 24 with a special plaque and new black upholstery. Gorman's health insurer, meanwhile, promptly canceled his coverage on account of his newly accursed exposure to drug overdoses, car rolling and kin-assaults. [Variety]

The Greatest Movie Ever Made (Or Something): Six Instant Implications of 'The Dark Knight'

The Dark Knight's record-breaking opening left us entranced by not only its tsunami of cash, but also by the news, commentary and other unclassifiable phenomena we spotted in its wake around the Web. For your Monday morning convenience, here's a glimpse at what the biggest three-day box-office weekend in history will get you: More »

It's Wall-E's World

If you emerged from Saturday's city-wide, Paps vs. Surfs caste riots with two or more limbs (and both flip-flops) intact, consider yourselves one of the lucky ones: It was a massacre out there, folks. Slow the bleeding with the box office numbers from this robust, bullet-bending moviegoing weekend: More »

Bad Math and Short Memories Spin Wacky 'Hulk' Hate-In

Two percent doesn't sound like much of a quantity on its face, but it's apparently more than enough room for studio execs to rejoice after recent box-office scans reveal this year's grosses are slightly up from those of Summer 2007. Observers attribute part of the bump to "better-than-expected" openings for films like Kung-Fu Panda, Sex and the City, The Happening and The Incredible Hulk, with the latter film's $55 million opening rounding out Marvel Studios' blockbuster tandem with Iron Man. More »

'The Incredible Hulk' Flexes His Guns

A just-about-perfect L.A. weekend is now over. Stir a little extra Hazelnut Coffee Mate into your World's Sexiest Assistant mug, and bite absentmindedly into some raspberry-jelly-filled box office numbers. We'll get through this: More »

Pandas Off The Hollywood Endangered List

Whether you spent your Sunday pridefully snorkeling Jäger bombs in WeHo or simply watching the Lakers' Championship hopes slip away, chances are, you're feeling pretty gnarly this morning. Here's some box-office-numbers hair of the dog to ease your crushing hangover: More »

Hollywood 2: Dawn Of The Ladies

The Brazilian wax you scheduled to coincide with your Sex and the City opening night party may have now given way to the discomforting condition known as a Bolivian rash—but luckily for you there exists no better topical salve than the weekend's boffo numbers: More »

'Indiana Jones' PlunderWatch

Indiana Jones PlunderWatch Projections

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'Indiana Jones' PlunderWatch: 'Skull' Cracks $9 Tril in Eight Hours

Indiana Jones PlunderWatch Projections

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New Poll Suggests 'Sex' More Appealing To May Moviegoers Than Superheroes And Fast Cars

Happy May Day. Why? Aside from May flowers, this month will finally bring some answers regarding all those conflicting box office predictions made in the trades weeks ago: will the upcoming back-to-back openings of Iron Man, Speed Racer, Prince Caspian and Indy 4 crush recession worries as Variety predicted? Or is the 19% decline in spring grosses only going to continue, as THR suggested mid-April? Well, the folks at Moviefone have provided us with a bit of guidance in the form of a poll measuring audience anticipation. And despite early rave reviews for Downey Jr.'s performance in Iron Man, the scores of kids aching for more Narnia adventures and testosterone-invigorating posters for Indy 4, it seems the majority of audience-goers only want to talk about Sex, baby. More »

Variety today predicted that next month could be Hollywood's biggest May ever, with four consecutive weeks of big titles — Iron Man, Speed Racer, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian and Indiana Jones 4 — leading the way into the more conventional blockbuster season of June and July. Of course, it was only a couple of weeks ago when some analysts suggested that a weak May hinted at an overall weak summer to come, but Pamela McClintock takes a more optimistic view: "For studios, the question isn't whether three of the May films can shoot past the $300 million mark domestically, as Spider-Man 3, Shrek the Third and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End ultimately did," she notes. "The question is whether the product is strong enough as a whole to make up for the lack of the three mega-franchises. ... Speed Racer, rated PG, may not open as big as the others but could have strong legs." Also of note: the bankable chick flicks Made of Honor and Sex and the City, whose $100 million won't be enough to break those studio heads' falls if and when their tentpoles snap. We'll know where to look for casualties in about a month. [Variety]

Unlikely $3 Million Man Ben Stein Arrives As New Great White Hope For Conservatives

On a Monday when Jet Li, Jackie Chan and Jason Segel's penis duked it out for biggest story at the weekend box office, another argument was taking place among indie followers who witnessed a different star performance altogether: Ben Stein, whose anti-Darwinist screed Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed finished in the week's ninth-place spot with $3.1 million. Its $2,997 per-screen average — no great shakes for most mainstream openers — is nevertheless more than double the $1,401 average of Morgan Spurlock's Where In the World is Osama Bin Laden? To hear at least one documentary observer tell it after the jump, love Stein or hate him, this is pretty big: More »

'Forbidden Kingdom' Audiences Forget About 'Sarah Marshall'

Keep the Monday morning blues at bay via the savory comforts of a matzoh, egg, and bacon breakfast sandwich, plus a generous helping of home-fried box office numbers: More »

Breaking: Film Industry Sources Still Cannot Predict Future as Scary Summer Looms

We always love a good box-office panic story this time of year, with studio execs smiling in your face and shitting in their pants while some exhibition insider somewhere blames the coming collapse on a batch of rotten tentpoles. Thank goodness for Carl DiOrio, whose Hollywood Reporter survey today notes that the spring season is down 19% from 2007 while summer promises even spicier drama to come: More »

Further accelerating his apparent collapse from coveted leading man to salt-and-pepper has-been, revised opening weekend figures for George Clooney's Leatherheads put the screwball gridiron comedy at a lackluster $12.6 million — a full million below Universal's original report and only enough for a third-place finish behind 21 and Nim's Island. While we maintain our original suspicion that no film can withstand a Reel Geezers pan, we don't actually think this portends the catastrophe foretold by more dedicated skeptics. We also appreciate Steven Zeitchik's moral support on Clooney's behalf at his Risky Biz blog: "Clooney hasn't opened a movie in a decade. Apart from the Ocean's pics — which the presence of Damon and Pitt render useless as evidence — no Clooney-anchored movie in recent memory has cracked $13 million in its first weekend of wide release. The Good German? Michael Clayton? Intolerable Cruelty? ... Box office just isn't his thing." Yessir, color us reassured. [Reuters]

Conservative Film Scholar Concerned That Iraq-Based Films Are 'Relentless Downers', Would Prefer More Iraqi Ass-Kicking

Our condolences go out this morning to Paramount, whose sulky, twangy, denim-and-rippling-flesh marketing push for Stop-Loss couldn't trick weekend moviegoers into checking out yet another Iraq War message movie. At Defamer HQ, the search for answers behind the disappointing $4.5 million gross — too many muscle shirts? Ryan Phillippe/Abbie Cornish babymaking rumors peaked too soon? — extended to the conservative journal Men's News Daily, where crack industry analyst Greg Strange's devastating Monday-morning hindsight is sharper than ever: More »

'21' Spends Its Winnings On Whores And Front Row Seats To 'KA'

Second guess your Monday morning instinct to feed that neckware noose into the office paper shredder with the knowledge that there really is something to live for: the box office numbers: More »

2008 Fails To Produce Absilicious-Spartan-Warrior Money

· The 2008 box office year has been "solid rather than spectacular," failing to yet produce the kind of runaway, $200 million-earning blockbuster that 300 did for the first quarter of 2007. You want a hit? Turn South Heavy Metal Park into a feature. [Variety] More »

Can 'Horton' Get A Woop Woop?

You wake up cold and confused, naked except for the half-singed bonnet on your head, and surrounded by hundreds of empty Peeps boxes and decapitated chocolate bunnies. Damn it: You've surrendered to another Easter weekend bender. Enjoy the last pulses of glucose shooting through your veins as you peruse the box office numbers: More »

Movie Industry Mouthpieces Shockingly Confident in Movie Industry's Recession Resiliency

In an environment as volatile and prone to bullshit as the film business is, we tip our caps to the guileless souls who keep it real when things are looking down. Particularly people like MPAA president Dan Glickman, who, when asked by Time Magazine how the industry's '08 crop of retreads, sequels and adaptations might weather the sluggish economy, steadfastly refused to toe the company line:

"When times are bad, our business seems to buck the trend," says Dan Glickman. ... "The movies are great therapy. It's a lot cheaper than a psychiatrist." ...

More »

Horton Hears Talk Of A Sequel

In honor of St. Patrick's day, we invite you to revisit the Crichton Leprechaun, peruse the screensavers and wallpapers available for download at colinfarrell.org, and dive into that bowl of cornflakes before the green beer turns them soggy. And while you're at it, have some box office numbers for good luck: More »

Clan Of The Cavemodels

As you recover from one of the more jarring daylight savings shifts in recent memory, try as hard as you can to avoid the stares of co-workers who can't help but notice you sporting your stubbornly punctual morning priapism. Perhaps the box office numbers will ease the transition: More »

Will Ferrell Will Do Literally Anything For Your Laugh-Dollars

Tend to the wounds of your ill-advised weekend bear-wrestling adventures with the box office numbers: More »