(Photo by Magnolia Pictures, New Line Cinema, Sony Pictures Classics, Columbia Pictures, Warner Bros. / courtesy Everett Collection)
Werewolves, mummies, and cobbled-together lab freaks have been around since the earliest decades of film, but no monster was perhaps more camera-ready than the vampire. Those counts and lords who love to mug and menace for the camera, mesmerize with their fancy capes, and whose pale skin glows in the luminous flicker of old film cameras. So no surprise that some of the best vampire movies back then are some of the best vampires now, like Dracula, Nosferatu, and Vampyr, even as they approach their centennial anniversaries. That’s the bar that’s been set for our guide to the essential and best vampire movies, and still we found plenty worthy to follow in their fang-steps.
Across legend, we know vampires for their allure and seductive properties. (Or at least, just their property — who wouldn’t be charmed by a 600-bedroom castle?) The sex appeal of the vampires has especially been played up in movies since the ’80s: As the sexy suburban neighbor (Fright Night), the upper-strata socialites (The Hunger), and a smoulderer’s row of hot guys (Interview with the Vampire) and leather jacket rebels (The Lost Boys).
Or if you just want some action, see From Dusk ‘Til Dawn, Daybreakers, Underworld, and 30 Days of Night.
So, looking for something to watch on your next open-coffin-and-chill night? Then go to bat with our 30 Essential Vampire Movies! —Alex Vo
Praise the sun! National Daylight Appreciation Day is here, inspiring this week’s gallery of 24 movies set under the blanket of night (or at least in rooms that could use a few windows) that will want you want to get grossly incandescent with some hot vitamin D.
[tomatometer]MuzeID=1210749[/tomatometer]
The Twilight Saga: New Moon has been in cinemas for almost a week. So, depending on your feelings towards sparkly vampires and extremely buff werewolves, you will either have seen it three times already (ZOMG RPattz!) or avoided it altogether. Either way, the fandemonium has subsided enough for us to look to the future. It’s just seven months until Eclipse, the third instalment of Stephenie Meyer‘s popular book series, hits the big screen. RT caught up with the cast in LA’s Four Seasons hotel during their manic New Moon press tour to get the latest on the eagerly anticipated film. We learned that Robert Pattinson hates pranks, that Nikki Reed loves werewolves and that we may just see a fifth film. Read on to find out more…
Fact #1: It’s Darker
The brand new poster for Eclipse (above) hints at a darker tone with its brooding storm clouds. With 30 Days of Night director David Slade at the helm, it’s unsurprising. “Every movie is different because we work with a different director on each one, which I love,” Taylor Lautner tells RT. “David Slade is perfect for the third film because it’s darker. Eclipse was my favourite book.”
Ashley Greene, who plays vampire Alice, tells RT that Slade isn’t just a prince of darkness. “David is actually hysterical,” she laughs, “He has such a dry sense of humour that sometimes you don’t know if he’s kidding or not. Eclipse will be amazing because he has made it far edgier and more dramatic. It’s going to look very cool.”
Continue onto the next page and beware some story spoilers as we tap the cast for more secrets from Eclipse.
Fact #2: There Will Be Less “Love Story” and More “War”
“Eclipse isn’t as intimate as Twilight or New Moon,” Robert Pattinson explains to us. “We’re at war, so I get to interact with more characters, not just Kristen. You’ll also find out more about the other members of the Cullen family. It just feels bigger.” But — fear not, Twihards — that isn’t to say the love story is cast aside altogether. “New Moon set up a love triangle with Bella, Edward and Jacob,” says Lautner. “So we explore that further in Eclipse. It’s a tough situation for all of them because Bella is torn between two guys, Jacob can’t get the girl that he loves and then there’s Edward, with all of his issues.”
Fact #3: The Werewolves Will Crank Up the Sex Appeal
“We all know the appeal of the vampire family,” says Nikki Reed, who plays vampire Rosalie. “But the werewolf boys are on a whole different level. They interact with a youthful, playful, comfortable warmth. It’s very sexy.”
As for Pattinson, he admits that his personal jealousy about Taylor Lautner’s newly-ripped physique actually comes in handy for the role. “In Eclipse, Taylor and I have lots of scenes together where we have to be jealous and petty with each other,” he says. “So it helps that I actually do feel inadequate when I see his body, especially because he’s younger than me. He fulfills every criteria of what teenage girls want, physically, in a guy. I felt like a had to prove myself against him.”
Fact #4: There’s More Action
“Filming Eclipse actually changed my life,” says Nikki Reed of the arduous training regime the cast had to endure. “I have never been so fit — this is the first time in my life I have actually had a bicep. It’s bizarre to compare how we look now to how we all looked in the first movie. The entire cast turned up on set for Eclipse looking super-buff.”
New cast member Bryce Dallas Howard tried to play a prank on the crew during one stunt, but she didn’t count on Pattinson’s awkwardness. “We had a fight scene where Bryce had to grab my hair,” he laughs. “So she took a clump of hair from my stunt double’s wig and was going to pretend she had pulled it from my head. She told me to scream and storm off set, but it was so embarrassing. She had this huge clump of hair in her hand, and I was like ‘oww,’ really unconvincingly.”
While the rest of the cast were having fun with stunts, spare a thought for poor Taylor Lautner. “Eclipse is a lot more physical for my character,” he explains, “but any time I have any kind of action, I’m a wolf, so it’s all done with CGI. It’s a bummer.”
Fact #5: The Ending Will Be Nicely Set Up For a Fourth – And Perhaps Fifth – Film
There are four books in The Twilight Saga: Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn. But Ashley Greene gave RT the strongest indication yet that there might be five films. “We have finished filming Eclipse and one would assume that, if New Moon does as well as Twilight, then we’ll start filming Breaking Dawn next year,” she says.
“The only thing is, Breaking Dawn is a very large book so it would be a really long movie. We’re thinking they might decide to split it into two parts, like they did with Harry Potter. Either way, we need to get on with shooting them because, unlike Harry Potter, vampires don’t age. So we all need to look the same!”
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is released worldwide in the summer of 2010.
RT Obscura, the exclusive column by renowned critic Kim Newman, sees the writer plumbing the depths of the RT archive in search of some forgotten gems. In his 16th column, Kim revisits Mike Figgis’ star-studded film-within-a-film vampire flick Hotel.
Shot fast and cheap in Venice in 2001, Hotel is even looser than director Mike Figgis‘s earlier Timecode. That had to keep four images in some sort of sync and thus could ill-afford sloppiness, but this improvised effort (Figgis’s background is in jazz, which says a lot) is lopsided, wilfully strange, not always coherent and feels as if lost hours of ‘deleted scenes’ might explain things.
The 24, mostly-excellent ‘web shorts’ included as an extra on the DVD don’t actually help with the story, but at least give actors who barely register in the actual film a shot at getting a laugh. They don’t seem to be online as of this writing, which is a shame. Despite everything, Hotel is a fun watch, has a freewheeling feel, is full of good jokes, and stretches to unusual creepy or erotic sequences. Even viewers who reject it out of hand (and there will be a lot) will find some scenes sticking in the memory — though I’d worry about anyone who tries to copy the kinkier stuff.
In the opening, guest Omar Johnson (John Malkovich) joins the staff of the Hungaro Hotel in Venice in a meal, which he partakes in from behind bars in a basement. The fare on offer turns out to be prosciutto made from human flesh. It seems the manager (Danny Huston) and his observant, odd staff — not to mention a huffy tour guide (Julian Sands) — are some variety of vampire, and they lurk in the background or around the margins, waiting for the unwary to wander into their clutches (Figgis consigns several of his most loathesome characters to their larder).
The guests are filmmakers working on a loopy-sounding Dogme version of John Webster‘s Jacobean The Duchess of Malfi. The nearly covert plot involves an assassination attempt which puts flamboyantly difficult director Trent Stoken (Rhys Ifans) in a coma so that sneaky producer Jonathan Danderfine (David Schwimmer) has to take over the film, a process which involves getting close to Stoken’s girlfriend-star Naomi (Saffron Burrows).
We get a few scenes from Malfi, as adapted by Heathcote Williams (who also plays Boscola), and glimpse what Burrows (“I am Duchess of Malfi still”), Mark Strong and other talents could make of the text; the play is so grotesquely violent and demented there has to date been no serious attempt to film it. There are sly send-ups of the Dogme film movement (“it means it will be badly-lit”), though the film-within-a-film scenes are actually slicker than the surrounding stuff. Salma Hayek shows up as the monstrous ‘Charlee Boux’, a catty cable TV documentary host who comes on like a feral version of the Geraldine Chaplin character from Nashville and enjoyably gets into a hissing fight with a rival (Lucy Liu) which echoes the animal snarling director and producer do at each other. Ifans is a lively, powerful, funny presence as a director who might be either a genius or a total idiot, and the film’s energy level sags notably when he’s in a coma.
There’s an entertaining if queasy emphasis on weird sex — with Stefania Rocca as a red-dressed call girl who dips her breasts in champagne glasses of milk for the benefit of a crass movie financier (George DiCenzo), quarter-of-the-screen vampire lesbian business, a peculiar sequence from Malfi in which Burrows takes the male role in a doggystyle sex scene before giving birth to twin baby dolls and Trent’s return from coma when his nurse (Chiara Mastroianni) uses him as a ceremonial sex aid.
Given that this is a movie which trades a lot on connections, note how many of the cast have been in vampire movies (admittedly, some made after Hotel): Malkovich (Shadow of the Vampire), Huston (30 Days of Night), Sands (Tale of a Vampire), Rocca (a 2002 made-for-TV Dracula), Liu (Rise), Hayek (From Dusk Till Dawn), Burrows (Perfect Creature); then again, maybe there are so many vampire movies around that any large-cast film will have a simialr record.
Also floating about are Valeria Golino as an actress who complains all her lines have been cut but she still has two nude scenes, Jason Isaacs as an Aussie star who quits when he gets a Ridley Scott film (guess who this is a jab at?), Burt Reynolds (!) as the spokesman for a flamenco troupe (if he really improvised his terrific, double-edged big speech, we’ll have to reassess him as a writer), Valentina Cervi as a maid and Alexandra Staden (who played Modesty Blaise in the direct-to-DVD My Name is Modesty) as a p.a. (barely visible in the film, but very funny in two of the ‘web-based shorts’ inclduing a wonderfully sustained phone routine about ordering drugs for the wrap party).
If Timecode was one movie occupying four equal screens, Hotel (which uses the Timecode splitscreen for several sequences) is more like four films which occupy the same screen — a Player-ish filmbiz comedy, that Dogme Duchess, the vampire picture and a sex/assassination conspiracy thriller. Perhaps predictably, this took a critical pasting; though, frankly, it’s got far more going for it than the ‘proper’ movie (Cold Creek Manor) Figgis made at about the same time.
Like Michael Winterbottom, Takashi Miike, Fassbinder or even Jesus Franco, Figgis is so prolific that he can afford to turn out experimental movies between more mainstream efforts, and seems to be more interested in stretching himself and playing with new toys (he designed his own camera rig for this) than turning out a consistent oeuvre. Like all of the above cited directors, he takes the risk of dashing off an indulgent exercise which befuddles more than it delights. And it is a risk — Alex Cox did one of those larks, Straight to Hell, and self-destructed a promising career.
Though it scores high on the “oh come on, now” meter, there are things in Hotel that repay repeat visits. And don’t miss the shorts — if only to see Danny Huston and Saffron Burrows doing what amounts to a Monty Python routine about the hotel bell and a marvelous standalone scene in which the producer has to bail his director and an actor out of an Italian jail before the show can go on.
He…is…Beowulf! Robert Zemeckis’ latest CGI hero leads the charge among this week’s new releases – get those pause buttons ready for Angelina’s nude scene, fellas! – but we’ve also got the latest from Wes Anderson (The Darjeeling Limited), a new adventure starring DC’s favorite superheroes (Justice League – The New Frontier), and vampires in the snow (30 Days of Night).
Tomatometer: 69%
No other title new to DVD this week comes close to achieving Beowulf-scale buzz; the Robert Zemeckis CGI-fest, about the titular epic hero and his battle with a demon and her hideous offspring, is a home video enthusiast’s dream. Sweeping landscapes and surprisingly excellent camera work enhance the centerpiece of this techno-forward project: namely, its near-lifelike motion captured performances by the likes of Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, and, yes, a nude Angelina Jolie. Pick up the unrated director’s cut, and if you’re so equipped, watch it in HD-DVD.
Tomatometer: 67%
Wes Anderson fans will feel instantly familiar with his latest film, about three estranged brothers (Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, and Adrien Brody) on a soul-searching train trek across India; as with The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic, and, let’s face it, each one of Anderson’s films, The Darjeeling Limited is imbued with a quirky sensibility, meticulous art design, a hipster-ready soundtrack, and a Wilson brother.
Justice League – The New Frontier
Tomatometer: N/A
David Boreanaz as The Green Lantern? Neil Patrick Harris as The Flash? A bizarre, but star-studded voice cast brings to life everyone’s favorite DC superheroes in this new animated movie, based on the comics miniseries. Featuring Golden Age characters like Wonder Woman (Lucy Lawless), Superman (Kyle MacLachlan), Batman (Jeremy Sisto), and Martian Manhunter (Miguel Ferrer), The New Frontier DVD boasts a bevy of special features, including a ten-minute preview of the next DC/Warner Bros. animated film, Batman: Gotham Knight.
Tomatometer: 50%
Based on the popular graphic novel of the same name, 30 Days of Night has something for everyone: vampires, a clever set up, and Josh Hartnett! OK, maybe the gory thrills aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but critics say it’s a decent, if erratic, pic for fans of the bloodsucker genre. Region 2 buyers get a bonus graphic novel, but stateside fans will have to settle for eight featurettes and a commentary track.
Tomatometer: 28%
Academy Award-winning director Milos Forman turns his attention to Spanish painter Francisco Goya (Stellan Skarsgard), who becomes witness to shifting politics and religion as his muse (Natalie Portman) is held prisoner by the Spanish Inquisition. Recent Oscar winner Javier Bardem rounds out the cast as Brother Lorenzo, a conflicted priest whose life is irrevocably intertwined with Goya’s, but even a handful of Oscar winners and real thespians couldn’t save this period pic from suffering the collective sigh of disappointment among critics.
Now that filming has finally begun on the first X-Men prequel, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, details of who will be joining Hugh Jackman on his latest trip down Adamantium Way are starting to come to light.
Details like, for instance, JoBlo‘s report that Danny Huston (30 Days of Night) is playing William Stryker, the U.S. Army colonel with an axe to grind against mutantkind. This news kinda-sorta adds weight to earlier reports that had Liev Schreiber playing Wolvie’s arch-nemesis, Sabretooth.
And that isn’t all: Not to be outdone, IESB has shared the news that Lynn Collins (The Number 23) has signed on to play Silver Fox, the hard-to-kill object of Wolverine’s affections. If you’ve been paying attention to the rumors, Collins as Silver Fox comes out of left field; other reports had Maggie Q or Michelle Monaghan tabbed to take the role.
But wait, there’s more! According to a member of SuperheroHype’s message board community, Taylor Kitsch (Friday Night Lights) has joined the cast, too — as Gambit, the card-throwing, stick-wielding Cajun anti-hero. The scooper claims that Kitsch has signed a three-picture deal.
Even Ain’t It Cool News has gotten in on the Wolverine casting rumor fun, speculating that none other than Ryan Reynolds has been chosen to play the “merc with a mouth,” Deadpool.
A final bit of Wolverine-related info comes from Film School Rejects, where “a very reliable source” has passed along an interesting, albeit spoilerish, piece of information about one of the film’s possible villains. We’re not going to share it here, but if you just can’t resist, follow the last of the links below!
Source: Ain’t It Cool News
Source: SuperheroHype
Source: JoBlo
Source: IESB
Source: Film School Rejects
Over the past few months, we’ve talked a lot about Sam Raimi‘s busy schedule as a producer, but his directorial follow-up to Spider-Man 3 has remained a mystery — until now, that is.
Variety reports that Raimi will step behind the cameras for Drag Me to Hell, a “supernatural thriller” co-written with his brother Ivan. The report describes the film as a “morality tale about the unwitting recipient of a supernatural curse,” and says financing will be handled by Ghost House, the production company Raimi started with Rob Tapert and Mandate Pictures whose previous releases have included 30 Days of Night, The Grudge, and The Grudge 2.
Drag Me to Hell, which the Raimis wrote in the early ’90s after finishing Army of Darkness, will be Ghost House’s first Raimi-directed release. Tapert tells Variety:
“Sam calls it a ‘spook-a-blast,’ a wild ride with all the chills and spills that ‘Evil Dead’ delivered, without relying on the excessive violence of that film. When one has done three very expensive movies, they get used to eating caviar. Sam will have to ponder what it means to come down from the mountaintop for a moment.”
But only for a moment: Variety says Raimi’s next order of business “is expected” to be a little picture called The Hobbit.
Source: Variety
Josh Hartnett has had a busy career since his big-screen debut in Halloween H20 in 1998. With 30 Days of Night, out now in cinemas, he marks horror book-ends to his career, nine years of experience transforming him from a vulnerable son in Halloween to a bona-fide protector in 30 Days.
Along the way he’s played a variety of roles in films as diverse as Black Hawk Down, Sin City and The Black Dahlia. He’d prefer if you didn’t mention Pearl Harbor.
Rotten Tomatoes caught up with Hartnett to find out more about his career, and his time on the vampire flick.
It seems that you have a passion for horror movies; this is not your first one. The Faculty, Halloween…
Josh Hartnett: I’s say The Faculty is kind of a spoof. Out of the 23 films that I have done, only two of them are really horror movies. I wouldn’t say that it’s my genre but I would say that this film was something that I thought would be an interesting project. I’m not limited by genre and it doesn’t really matter what the genre is as long as the film is going to be new and have some real artistic integrity. This was a good group of people to work with.
We haven’t seen vampires like this on screen for a long time.
JH: Yeah, it kind of harkens back to the original concept of vampires, maybe more the silent area, the Nosferatu types, but more the Nosferatu that can actually move. It’s more about it’s more about these creatures being creatures and less about them being humanised.
I think vampires have gotten maybe a little bit silly in the last few years where they’re all wearing crushed velvet and reading poetry and making sweet love to their victims, you know, it’s not really all that scary.
First of all I liked the way that Ben Templesmith drew the vampires and I liked the way that David Slade kind of brought that to the screen. I think Danny Huston really flushes it out and makes it a fully-fledged character and half the reason that this film works because Danny plays Marlow.
Eben’s kind of an unlikely hero as well in the sense that he’s a good deal more reluctant than your usual vampire movie heroes.
JH: We made him more like that than he was in the comic book. We spent a little bit of time before we started filming, rewriting and trying to figure out how to adapt this. The type of film that this was for me was a Western with supernatural overtones. The character is, I think, more interesting when he is isolated so I wanted him emotionally isolated. We took the relationship he has in the comic book with his wife, where they’re kind of this dynamic duo and we separated them and then had that have a major effect on how he related to his younger brother.
So basically he is someone who is not letting a lot of people in when the movie starts and nor is he capable of relating to a lot of people. And, obviously, the physical isolation of being in the middle of nowhere in the Great North adds to that.
JH: There were 20 days of cold shooting and 33 days of night shoots. We shot the first bit of the film in a snow farm in Wanaka which is on the South Island of New Zealand. We were on top of a mountain a couple of hundred metres away from where the US snowboard team was practising
It was horribly cold and I actually had Mono at the time – I was sick as a dog – so that made it even more chilling. And then when we finished that we went up to Auckland where it was pretty warm and shot the rest of it on these sets that were built by an amazing set designer with fake snow and all that. But we shot a lot of nights up there; a lot of it was outdoors.
The night thing, we had about a month and a half where we never slept during the night and were never awake during the day which was a little unnerving after a while.
What was Danny Huston like to work with?
JH: Danny was a friend of mine before we even started so it was just fun to work with him. He’s a professional but he’s also a real gentlemen so there’s not a lot of method bullshit; just a lot of trying to figure out how to create the best image, how to create the best character, and I loved talking to him about that. There was a lot of communication, especially between him and David Slade, because really Danny and I are only in one scene together and it’s almost purely physical. That sounds weird! We just beat the crap out of each other!
Watching this you get the sense that your roles have matured. Back in the day you’d have been cast as your younger brother.
JH: Yeah! [laughs] I don’t know, I never really think of it that way, I just think of interesting roles to play. I guess that I have matured, I guess growing up and becoming a man, your taste in characters changes and I think I have become more interested in active characters as I have become less contemplative in my personal life. Things have become a little bit more interesting in the doing these days and less interesting in the thinking about the doing.
So you’re a lot more comfortable on a film set? That it’s not something you have to think a lot about anymore?
JH: No, not at all. I was talking about my personal life being less absorbed in the concepts of life and more interested in actually getting out and feeling it and being a part of it. I was a kind-of contemplative kid and I think the characters reflected that, a lot of them were ponderous and I think it’s been more fun now to find characters that are a little bit more outgoing. The character that I play next, in this film August that I produced as well – David Bowie was in it with me and Naomi Harris who is an excellent British actress – the character is just a real jerk, he’s starting to keep this company afloat just through sheer force of personality and he will sell anything to anybody if it will help save this precious golden egg that he thought he had created in this company. But I think that just your tastes change as you get older and I think they’ll continue to change.
As that happens, do you see yourself becoming more interested in the behind-the-camera roles?
JH: Control is always good, you know. Having a little bit more say and having a little bit more I guess depth of understanding in the process. Yeah I guess I will probably produce a little bit more. I’ve got a couple of scripts that I am producing right now that are still in the works and I have written a few things. I don’t know, we’ll see where it all ends up going. But for me it’s a career, you create as you go along and you can’t worry about always being on top.
Talking of challenges, is the Chet Baker thing still on?
JH: Yeah the Chet Baker thing is still on but it’s set back right now because some people just don’t believe that we need any more work on the script but I think that the script needs quite a bit more work before it can be the great film that it could be. I dropped out, knowing full well that it’s probably one of the greatest characters that I will ever actually get to play. But if it’s not done right I don’t want to do it, just to do it, you know…
This is probably the first film you’ve done where there’s been an enormous fan interest in it from conception – did you get a sense of that during the production?
JH: I don’t spend a lot of time on the internet in general so I don’t really get much of a sense of that. It’s like reading reviews; you don’t want to get too caught up in what too many people are saying about what you are doing as long as you feel like you’re growing and the people that you trust will tell you the truth. I have been lucky enough to meet a lot of my idols in this industry and there are some great actors who don’t bullshit me and tell me when I am doing good work and when I am not. These are people I really have to listen to. And so I guess going online and listening to the opinions of everybody would be maddening.
But you did go to Comic-Con?
JH: I did do that and I actually really enjoyed it. There was a really funny comment at Comic-Con where a guy came up and he said “you know Ben I like everything you do,” to Ben Foster, and then he said, “And Mr Raimi you really are a genius. But Josh some of the stuff you do is really like…” [Laughs] Stop right there! I’m all over the place, I do a lot of weird movies that maybe you don’t like and I experiment a lot but maybe I do appreciate the process and I think my greatest joy in this business is that I have had the ability to screw up in a lot of really interesting films!
You learn so much from making mistakes, not even necessarily mistakes that I’ve made, a lot of the time the films just don’t work out because it’s a really difficult process. And sometimes there’s a certain person underlining process. But I’ve had an opportunity to work on all different types of films and I have had a lot of opportunities to stretch myself in different ways and now is the time where I get to try and figure out out the roles that I can really play well and play them well. But I wanted to experiment; I wanted to keep growing. I didn’t want to just sit back and rest on my haunches and do the things I knew I could do for a while.
I would rather gamble it all away than play it safe you know? And now it’s time to sink into some really interesting work. And this movie August and this other one I Come With the Rain are two of them and I am just hopefully going to keep on growing.
Jigsaw’s twisted games return for another late-October round of torture fun with Saw IV which should allow the lucrative franchise to claim the biggest horror opening of the year for the second straight time. The R-rated gorefest follows last year’s Saw III which bowed to $33.6M this very weekend setting a new debut record for the series. Jigsaw’s death in that installment did not stop a fourth flick from being produced since the most popular horror movie villains never truly die anyway. Although III set a new opening weekend record for the Lionsgate series, it did not match Saw II‘s overall $87M gross and instead finished a bit behind with $80.2M. Still, with small budgets (Saw III was produced for $12M) this cash cow continues to churn out profits and shows no sign of stopping.
The audience for Saw IV is clearly defined and new fans are not likely to be generated. Competition will come primarily from last weekend’s number one opener 30 Days of Night which will suffer a sharp fall this weekend. Otherwise, there is not much to distract genre fans on the weekend before the pumpkin holiday. The marketing has been on par with previous films, but as the franchise ages it risks losing fans who may have had enough with three helpings already. Plus this year has seen a wide assortment of horror films crash and burn which has led to some fright fatigue. Another factor could be the World Series which last year only affected Saw III‘s Friday bow but this year will cut into both Saturday and Sunday business. Many young adults may opt for the torture that the Red Sox are inflicting on the Rockies instead. Saw IV opens on Friday in 3,183 locations and could take in about $29M over three days.
LAST YEAR: Like clockwork, Saw III came in and dominated the pre-Halloween box office with a franchise-best $33.6M debut grossing more than the rest of the top five combined. The Jigsaw pic eroded fast and ended up trailing Saw II‘s total tally and finished with $80.2M. Holding tight in second place was Martin Scorsese‘s crime saga The Departed with $9.8M in its fourth assignment and the lowest drop in the top ten. The magician drama The Prestige followed closely in third with $9.6M. The war drama Flags of Our Fathers ranked fourth with $6.3M while the animated hit Open Season placed fifth with $5.9M. Opening to dismal results outside the top ten was the Tim Robbins drama Catch A Fire with only $2M on its way to a horrible $4.3M. Platforming in only seven sites was the ensemble drama Babel which went on to gross $34.3M and win the Golden Globe for Best Picture – Drama.
Author: Gitesh Pandya, www.BoxOfficeGuru.com
Sam Raimi
has revealed an unusual list of titles for his Ghost House Pictures production
company. They have done well releasing horror films like
Boogeyman and
The Messengers,
but now it appears even their less successful films will be getting sequels.
"The sequel to the
Rise
movie, Rise 2, that’s on the fast track to production written by Ben
Ketai," said Raimi.
Rise barely hit theaters despite starring
Lucy Liu and
Michael
Chiklis. Ketai has written additional side projects attached to Ghost House
films like The Grudge
and 30 Days of
Night. Can he get the big stars to come back?
"I don’t know. It’s just being written now. We haven’t
talked about casting yet."
The Grudge may have been Ghost House’s biggest hit
but the sequel suffered an enormous loss of audience. Despite that, there’s
still some heat on The Grudge. "Right now, a screenplay for Grudge 3
is being written. We’re hoping, if we get the right script, to go into
production but the writer’s strike may impact that. It may impact everything
that I’m saying, I’ll just say that."
The third upcoming project for Ghost House at least does
not have any negative buzz attached to it. "There’s currently Drag Me to Hell.
We’re hoping to go into production on that. That’s the curse movie directed by
Jeff Lynch, a first time live-action director. Hopefully that’ll go into
production this winter also."
Bloodthirty vampires flew high, depressing dramas sank, and many holdovers
held up well at the North American box office. The new horror flick
30 Days of Night
easily ruled the charts while a handful of adult dramas were met with opening
weekend sales that ranged from mild to embarrassing. Oscar-winning actresses
Reese
Witherspoon and
Halle Berry
both failed miserably with their new serious stories which were both shunned by
ticket buyers. With so many fall offerings eating into each others’ business,
the overall marketplace remained sluggish as for the fifth consecutive weekend
the top ten slumped below year-ago levels.
Sony commanded the top spot with its R-rated gorefest
30 Days of Night
which opened with an estimated $16M over the Friday-to-Sunday period. Attacking
2,855 theaters, the vampires-in-Alaska pic averaged a solid $5,604 and tapped
into a pre-Halloween box office that offered no major scary movies. The lack of
competition helped the $30M
Josh Hartnett
starrer which brought out older teens, young adults, and genre fans. Days
was based on a popular graphic novel and earned mixed reviews which is above
average by horror picture standards.
Tyler Perry
followed up his muscular top spot debut for his latest comedy
Why
Did I Get Married? with a strong second weekend hold dropping only
43% to an estimated $12.1M. After just ten days in theaters, the Lionsgate
release has already collected a sturdy $38.9M which is just ahead of the $38.1M
that Perry’s first film
Diary of a
Mad Black Woman took in during its first ten days in 2005. Married
suffered a smaller drop than his other films witnessed indicating that the
filmmaker’s latest entry could be reaching beyond its core African American
audience. Diary fell 50% in its sophomore session while
Madea’s Family Reunion and
Daddy’s Little
Girls tumbled by about 57% each. Married looks on course to reach
a remarkable $65-70M which would be a new career high for Perry
Posting the smallest decline in the top ten once again was
The Rock‘s hit family
comedy The Game
Plan which ranked third in its fourth weekend with an estimated
$8.1M. That represented a slim drop of only 26% and boosted Disney’s cume to
$69.2M. The durable sensation ranks as the actor’s second biggest hit in a lead
role after The Scorpion King which took in $90.5M in 2002.
Game Plan should
easily surpass that mark and has not yet seen a drop of more than 35%.
Also holding up very well was
George Clooney‘s legal thriller
Michael Clayton
which remained in fourth place with an estimated $7.1M. The Warner Bros. title
dropped by only 32% and boosted its total gross to $22M matching its production
budget. The marketplace was crowded with adult dramas targeting Clayton‘s
audience so the strong hold was an impressive performance. Powerful reviews and
good word-of-mouth contributed to the success. A final tally of $40-50M may
result.
Two new films fought fiercely over the number five spot. Miramax estimated that
its kidnapping thriller
Gone Baby Gone would collect $6M over the weekend from
1,713 theaters for a mild $3,503 average. The directorial debut of
Ben Affleck
stars his brother
Casey Affleck along with
Morgan Freeman and
Ed Harris and was
greeted with stellar reviews from film critics. Produced for $19M, Gone faced
tough competition from other adult dramas but could have legs in the weeks
ahead.
Aiming for teens and young adults with a dose of immature spoof comedy was
The
Comebacks which grossed an estimated $5.9M for Fox. The PG-13 sports film
enjoyed a much wider release in 2,812 venues and generated a dull $2,080
average. The debut was nowhere near the numbers that the studio has seen in the
recent past with its other spoof comedies. Both
Epic Movie from earlier this
year and Date Movie from 2006 debuted to about $19M. Comebacks will be lucky to
reach that amount overall.
Falling hardest among holdover titles was the
Joaquin
Phoenix/Mark
Wahlberg
crime thriller
We Own the Night
which dropped by 49% to an estimated $5.5M in its second weekend. The Sony
release has banked $19.8M in ten days and looks headed for a mediocre finish of
$30-33M.
Generating the hottest average in the top ten was the latest re-release of Tim
Burton’s creepy animated hit
The Nightmare Before Christmas which debuted to an
estimated $5.1M from only 564 theaters for a potent $9,122 average. The special
3D version was given a wider launch by Disney compared to this weekend a year
ago when it opened in 168 theaters for a $3.3M weekend and sizzling $19,506
average. That re-release bagged $8.7M while its original 1993 run brought in
$50M. With no other good options for parents other than the studio’s own The
Game Plan, Nightmare proved to be an exciting pre-Halloween option for families.
The PG-rated film will only play for a limited three-week engagement and goes
back into the Mouse House’s vault soon after the pumpkin holiday.
Moviegoers ignored the terrorism drama
Rendition despite its acclaimed cast
allowing it to barely debut in the top ten. The New Line release opened to an
estimated $4.2M from 2,250 locations for a horrible $1,856 average. It was Reese
Witherspoon’s first film since winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for
2005’s Walk the Line, but fans were not biting. Jake Gyllenhaal,
Meryl Streep,
and Alan Arkin also starred in the R-rated story of a woman in search of her
Egyptian-born husband who is captured by the CIA after being suspected of being
a terrorist. Rendition was the third film in recent weeks dealing with Middle
East issues and entered a marketplace flooded with serious adult dramas. Plus
lukewarm reviews helped to make this a non-priority among ticket buyers this
weekend.
Rounding out the top ten was the
Ben Stiller comedy
The
Heartbreak Kid with an
estimated $3.9M, off 46%, for a $32.1M cume for Paramount.
Halle Berry joined fellow Oscar-winning actress Reese in striking out with
audiences with her new adult drama. The former Storm headlined the Paramount
release
Things We Lost in the Fire with
Benicio Del Toro and attracted a measly
$1.6M in business on opening weekend, according to estimates. Debuting in 1,142
locations, the R-rated film about a woman who befriends her dead husband’s
heroin-addicted pal averaged a pathetic $1,405. Reviews were generally favorable
and studio research indicated that two-thirds of the audience consisted of women
over 30. Fire cost a relatively low $16M to produce, but has a long road ahead
of it in order to reach profitability.
Two additional films risked going nationwide and met with embarrassing results.
The teen thriller
Sarah Landon and the Paranormal Hour bowed to an estimated
$560,000 from 1,115 theaters for a disastrous $502 average for Freestyle
Releasing. Meanwhile, Rocky Mountain Pictures unleashed its animated pic
The Ten
Commandments in 830 sites and was met with only $480,000, according to
estimates, for a horrible $578 average. Both films should find their primary
audiences on DVD.
Focus saw a soft bow for its downbeat drama
Reservation Road which debuted in
just fourteen theaters for a weak estimate of $36,821 for a poor average of
$2,630. The arthouse crowd was just not in the mood for this depressing drama
about the death of a young boy which starred Joaquin Phoenix,
Mark Ruffalo,
Jennifer Connelly, and
Mira Sorvino. Also hurting
Road‘s performance were
reviews that were far from glowing.
With all the new content in the multiplexes, five films were tossed out of the
top ten over the weekend. The costume drama sequel
Elizabeth: The Golden Age
dropped 49% in its sophomore session to an estimated $3.1M giving Universal a
weak $11.2M in ten days. Look for the
Cate Blanchett pic to end its domestic run
with a dismal $16-18M. Overseas prospects do look brighter though.
Sony’s durable musical extravaganza
Across the
Universe dipped by 29% to an
estimated $2.7M for a solid $16.8M total from less than 1,000 theaters. A
$25-30M final could result. The Saudi Arabia-set political thriller
The Kingdom fell by 48% in its fourth outing to an estimated $2.4M. Universal has taken in
$44M thus far and should end up with just under $50M which means that the $70M
production will need to still work hard overseas and on video in order to break
even.
The Milla Jovovich threequel
Resident Evil: Extinction tumbled 60% to an
estimated $1.1M and raised its sum to a cool $50M. Fox’s fantasy adventure
The
Seeker: The Dark is Rising saw its weekend gross nosedive by an alarming 81% to
an estimated $425,000 lifting the dull total to $8.2M with little left to go.
The top ten films grossed an estimated $73.9M which was down 10% from last year
when The Prestige debuted in first place with $14.8M; but up 13% from 2005 when
Doom opened in the top spot with $15.5M.
