You may not have noticed on account of Burnsy being too busy partying at Sony headquarters to do a Weekend Movie Guide post on Friday, but this weekend’s new major releases were the found-footage telekinesis film Chronicle, the Daniel Radcliffe horror story The Woman in Black (RUN FOR YOUR LIVES, HE’S DORKY AND BRITISH!), and Drew Barrymore’s inspirational love story set in the world of stranded whales, Big Miracle (hashtag describe your penis with a movie). Chronicle won the day with an estimated $22 million for the weekend (on a $12 million budget), with Woman in Black hot on its heels at $21 m. Almost inconceivably, given America’s love affair with speech impediments and marine mammals, Big Miracle landed all the way at number four, grossing just $8.5 million on a $40 million budget.

That sounds like a bomb, and it is, but what did they expect opening against the Super Bowl? I’m sure it will do much better next week when the fanatical Drew Barrymore and John Krasinski fans aren’t all home watching the game.

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George Lucas’s black guilt campaign failed over the weekend, as Red Tails‘ “foolish Africans” were no match for Kate Beckinsale’s hot ass fighting werewolves (or is it vampires?) in Underworld: Awakening. Underworld and Red Tails went one and two, while Marky Mark once again stopped 9/11, with Contraband beating out Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close for the three spot (“HOW YOU LIKE THOSE WAHLBURGAHS, LOOZAH! GO PATS!”). Meanwhile, poor Gina Carano and Haywire opened lower than even Tom Hanks’ 9/11 film. It’s okay, baby, you still explode my tower, if you know what I mean. (I am so, so very sorry for that).

Red Tails rated 33% among critics, but received an A grade from audiences (via cinemascore), almost the inverse of Haywire‘s 82% among critics and D+ on cinemascore. Audiences apparently were so happy to see black war heroes that they ignored lines like “Die, you foolish African,” and “I guess there’s more to you coloreds than I thought!”, while critics failed to recognize that a movie that isn’t bad isn’t the same thing as one that’s good. Red Tails did an incredible job convincing black people that it was their duty to see a crappy movie because it had black people in it, while MMA fans tried to do the same with Haywire.

I’m not a black dude, so I can’t really speak to the Red Tails guilt campaign, but I’m pretty sure there were black movies before this, and there will be plenty after it, whether or not we give George Lucas our money for his uncredited remake of The Tuskeegee Airmen. But as a die-hard MMA fan, I can tell you that if I was in the habit of seeing movies just because MMA stars were in them, there are plenty of Hector Echavarria movies I could rent.

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Over the weekend, derivative, found-footage horror film The Devil Inside boldly proved to all the Oscar films it was competing against that reading is for fa99ots, and earned $34.5 million, good enough for the third-best January opening ever (behind Cloverfield and the Star Wars re-release), all on a $1 million budget. I didn’t see it because the trailer looked like a mash-up of horror movie tropes, and the found-footage conceit for movies is getting as old as the we’re-making-a-fake-documentary schtick is on TV, but all weekend I’ve been getting emails about the film’s ending, or lackthereof. It’s apparently rather abrupt, and points the audience to a website. Here’s what the filmmakers had to say about it:

Matthew Peterman [director]: We had a couple of endings that we were working on. Paramount did a really cool thing with that website (TheRossiFiles.com), to drive people to the website after the movie. We think it’s pretty cool, and that’s never really been done before, with the interactivity of that. Whether it works or not, we’ll see. Some people like it, and some people don’t, but as for the ending, and the abrupt nature of it, we played around with some stuff. But sometimes, in real life, and we tried to make this movie feel as real as possible, it doesn’t follow a three-act structure like movies do. Things don’t always end the way you expect them too, or they don’t end at the right time, or happily, either. We just tried to make a pretty realistic ending. What’s going on at the end of this film is very shocking, it’s intense, and there’s some evil going on, and it’s not always going to happen the way you expect it to. We just wanted to make it as realistic as possible. [MovieWeb]

Or, as FilmDrunkard Matthew describes it (which I guess is kind of a spoiler, even though it doesn’t get into plot details):

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UPDATE: According to the just-released updated numbers, Dragon Tattoo beat Chipmunks by $100K. Still too close to call.

There were three new releases over the Christmas holiday, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Tintin, and We Bought a Zoo, and all three got out-earned by last week’s top three, Mission Impossible IV, Sherlock Holmes 2, and Alvin and the Chipmunks 3. Dragon Tattoo earned an estimated $13 million for the weekend, which isn’t terrible — BoxOfficeMojo compares it to True Grit‘s $16 million on the same weekend last year — but was still below expectations.

Now, there are a few ways to read this. Obviously, one is that it’s a precursor to locusts and zombies on horseback as a harbinger of the apocalypse. Another way to read it is as a validation of Mission Impossible‘s platform-release strategy, where it came out in IMAX a week early, and by Christmas time, everyone had heard of it (I get the sense people just didn’t know some of these movies were out yet). And of course, there’s always the possibility that people were with their families on Christmas, and didn’t want to drag grandma to a film featuring graphic rape and gratuitous merkins. Not me though. My grandma practically invented the merkin. She even weaved one for the German Chancellor, Angela Merkin.

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Coming off last week’s worst box office weekend since 2008, there was hope that some bigger films would turn things around. Overall they did better than last week, but totals were down 13 percent from the same weekend last year. Sherlock Holmes 2 grossed $40 million domestically, which is decent, but disappointing compared to the last one’s $62 million opening. Alvin & the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked made less than half what the Squeakquel made on opening weekend (WHEREFORE ART THOU, SQUEAKUEL?). It’s pretty bad when sequels are down significantly from their predecessors, given that even the sh*ttiest ones tend to out-earn the original thanks to name recognition. Mission Impossible was the only success, with its early, $13 million IMAX release qualifying it as the highest-grossing opening weekend for a limited release (fewer than 600 theaters).

Basically, films aren’t the draw they once were. With streaming and cable and TV shows getting better and better, there’s a lot more competition now, and the longer studios ignore it and try to operate like they always have (releasing all their “smart” movies at the end of December, for instance), the more it’s going to continue to decline. Almost without exception, all the decent movies I saw this year were films that the distributors considered too niche for a broad audience and almost no one saw them, because they barely had a chance to. Meanwhile this week’s top three releases have a 2, 3, and 4 next to the titles, and all had concepts created in the 1960s or earlier. If films are going to compete long-term, they’re going to have to start giving the “niche” stuff that gets people excited about movies a chance to compete with the bland blockbusters that make money. There are only so many Dark Knights. The general public has a major ambivalence towards movies right now, and if it doesn’t get better soon it’s going to turn into a grandpa medium the way late-night TV has. Even worse, if people stop going to see movies, they’re probably going to stop caring about movie news, and may even stop reading my website! CAN YOU IMAGINE A GREATER TRAGEDY TO BEFALL HUMANITY? Then what, I have to get a real job? Screw that, bro. Trust me, you don’t want me in the job market. Read the rest of this entry »