BOB: Sucker Punching Dead Horses
Monday, March 28, 2011 at 8:30PM Today's Box Office Blather is short, though hardly sweet. The weekend had only two wide openings which fought it out for two markets: the family and the fanboys. Though girls ruled and boys drooled on Friday when Sucker Punch triumphed, family-market films always grow over opening weekends rather than fade like normal movies.
Carla Gugino, Jena Malone, Abbie Cornish, Emily Browning, Jamie Chung and Vanessa Hudgens at the Sucker Punch premiere
So the weekend went to Wimpy Kids rather than Violent Girls.
01. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules $23.7 new
02. Sucker Punch $19 new
03. Limitless $15 (cumulative: $41.1)
04. The Lincoln Lawyer $10.7 (cumulative: $28.7)
05. Rango $9.7 million (cumulative: $106.3)
Limitless and Lincoln held well in week 2 indicating that people who saw them last week maybe didn't regret their ticket purchases. Rango is now the top grosser of 2011, a title it seems likely to hold until the end of May when Johnny Depp will overthrow himself by way of Pirates #4. (Sigh) Unless Thor gets deified by general audiences or Jane Eyre busts out of her bodice on a record breaking 6,321 screens... all of them sold out for the rest of the summer. (Sorry, fever dream on account of the feverishly Fassbending podcast. But wouldn't it be great if box office were THAT impossible to predict? Hypothetical question. The answer is yes.)
What did you see this weekend? Besides Mildred Pierce, I mean.
Finally, in Shamelessly Beating Dead Horses news: the PG-13 version of The King's Speech opens this Friday. Begone naughty fuck word, you have no power here! The King's Profanity has been redacted. Oscar campaigns don't pay for themselves, people. Although, the $15 million dollar budgeted film has already earned $361 million worldwide so now they're just being greedy fuckers.
Johnny Depp, MPAA, Rango, Sucker Punch, The King's Speech, box office
Reader Comments (15)
Have you seen the new poster for King’s Speech, the PG-13 version? To me, it doesn’t look like an Oscar winning movie at all. The poster looks like a scene where King and Queen are attending the girl’s school concert and telling the girl she was good on stage.
I saw Sucker Punch last weekend. Let me tell you the action and visual (and even the girls) are R rated level, but the story is PG level.
Hey Nathaniel - how do you get to be a reader of the day?
I saw Sucker Punch on Friday. I honestly did not think it was terrible. The story is too straight forward to hold up all those fantasy sequences, though I didn't think anything was too offensive, exploitative, or bad. Then again, I thought it played out a lot like a musical (without singing), which may have colored my judgment. I guess people weren't expecting dance-like battles set to variations of contemporary songs that held meaning to the story at hand and impacted the growth of the characters.
I don't think it was stupid or plot-less, confusing or exploitative. It was just a wasted opportunity that needed a bit less of a linear structure to work as well as it should have.
Emily, what the cock is on your face? Girrrrrrl.
I'm so happy Emma Stone turned down Sucker Ounch for Easy A. Look at where she is now and where she would have been.
I sympathize with the producers of "The King's Speech" insofar as the American ratings system is ridiculous and there's no reason whatsoever the film shouldn't have been PG/PG-13. In Canada, it was.
Yeah, there's no other word to think of besides "greed" in referring to the re-release of The King's Speech...what kind of new audience are they hoping to reach??? Toddlers? Everyone and their grandma has seen this movie and loved it all the same. Ugh.
"Jane Eyre busts out of her bodice"...I giggled out loud when I read this. I'm such a nerd. I still haven't seen this movie yet (cause it hasn't expanded to my city :( ) but I can't wait.
And I was dragged to see Sucker Punch this weekend and the film made absolutely zero sense.
Slightly off-topic, but very excited to see Source Code this weekend, reviews are good and yay for more Duncan Jones :-)
The King's Shhhhh don't say those naughty f' words!
I saw a German film called "Poll" ("The Poll Diaries") on Sunday. The film did get 5 nominations for the German Film Awards, but wasn't nominated for Best Picture and I really can't figure out why it didn't make the cut. It's engrossing, poetic, (at times) grotesque, romantic, violent, tender and absolutely gorgeous to look at. Something I also found interesting about it is that it was mostly made by women. The writer/director (Chris Kraus) is male, but the producers, the DoP, the editor, the composer and the production designer are all female.
I saw Potiche. Can't wait for your opinion!
May I just say the Sucker Punch girls look just awful in that picture?
I don't think it's only about greed...I know schools who wanted to set up screenings but couldn't because the film is rated R...
Now that it's PG-13 schools don't need consent to show it. Why blame Weinstein when we should be pointing fingers at the MPAA for giving it the same rating as Saw...
Not crazy about the "BOB' moniker.
Is it just me or does Emily Browning eerily look like Thora Birch in that picture from the premiere?