Box Office: The Lone Ranger Will Likely Not Ride Again

When I heard a few little kids doing that "bee-doh-bee-doh-bee-doh" siren noise in the exact inflection of a minion from Despicable Me 2 last week -- and that was just from trailer-indoctrination alone, y'know? -- I knew the box office would be gargantuan. And so it was becoming the 10th highest grosser of 2013 (thus far) after just 4 days of release. 

The Lone Ranger comes with a ready made catchphrase too... "Hi Yo, Silver. Away!" but the movie which is both too hip and too square for its own good (what is its target audience exactly? Other than "all" which often results in confusing tones), demeans the very use of it so you wont hear little kids doing any Lone Ranger chants in the streets. The box office opening for that film was dismal given its $215+ million budget. I'd say "don't expect a sequel" but you never know these days when they'll make a cheapo sequel (or reboot) to anything, "Branding" being everything in Hollywood.

TOP TEN
01 DESPICABLE ME 2 $82.5 *NEW* (cum. $142)
02 THE LONE RANGER $29.4 *NEW* (cum. $48.9)
03 THE HEAT  $25 (cum. $86.3) Capsule
04 MONSTERS UNIVERSITY  $19.5 (cum. $216.1) Review
05 WORLD WAR Z $18.2 (cum. $158.7) Review 
06 WHITE HOUSE DOWN  $13.5 (cum. $50.4)
07 MAN OF STEEL  $11.4 (cum. $271.2) Superheroes and Security
08 KEVIN HART: LET ME EXPLAIN $10.1 *NEW* (cum. $17.4)
09 THIS IS THE END $5.8 (cum. $85.8)
10 NOW YOU SEE ME $2.7 (cum. $110.4)

Of Note: Now You See Me has to be the sole contender for 'biggest hit of 2013 that nobody ever talks about' right? It's like one of those ol' CBS dramas from years past that were always super high in the Nielsens but had zero pop culture caché. 

Armie & Johnny get a look at their box office grosses

poll by twiigs.com

Honest question: who takes the blame for The Lone Ranger's failure to ignite? We've seen in the past that Hollywood is loathe to question the earning power of stars as big as Johnny Depp (note how long shtick-maestros John Travolta and Nicolas Cage were able to command huge paychecks in the 90s and Aughts with far far less in the way of consistent box office performance than Depp). Director Gore Verbinski has several blockbusters under his belt, too. Will they scapegoat the whole thing on poor Armie Hammer? He sure is handsome but he does seem to have been anointed the next big leading man far far sooner than his filmography requested. In fact, people were throwing leading roles and money at him after just one major supporting role (The Social Network), a film which he hardly had to carry or even elevate given how great it was coming together from virtually every angle. 

In platform limited release the coming-of-age summer film The Way Way Back (with a great cast that features Toni Collette, Sam Rockwell, Maya Rudolph and more) won the biggest numbers of the weekend which bodes well for its future. The documentary 20 Feet From Stardom, about backup singers to famous rock stars, continues to pull in big numbers on track to becoming the biggest doc hit of the year. Will an Oscar nomination follow? Oscar does like movies about the difficulties of showbiz. Oscar relates even if he's the biggest and sturdiest star of all. 

I Guess That's Why They Call It The Link

Hotel Chatter Regina King shows us the best revenge when you're dumped and your tv show is cancelled: look fabulous and happy
Antagony & Ecstasy reviews all Star Trek movies for you because Tim is generous and completist like that
IndieWire Kon-Tiki directors get the next high seas Pirates of the Caribbean gig. Typecasting!  
Broadway World what's next for the stars of the now-departed Broadway tv series Smash? 

Variety Johnny Depp leave the Whitey Bulger biopic Black Mass... no reasons have been given but I'm guess playing real humans is too scary for him! 
Towleroad Joe Manganiello in the best shape of his life and filming Ten with childhood idol Arnold Schwarzenegger
Los Angeles Times Neil Patrick Harris to host the Emmys just a few months after hosting the Tonys. With him becoming a mainstay at both I guess he'll never get to host the Oscars. 
i09 7 bad storytelling habits taught to us by comic books (most of them are very evident in today's franchise culture... even the ones without superheroes) 

Today's Must Read
Self Styled Siren goes to the ATM, withdraws movie thoughts

Today's Must Watch
How it Should Have Ended take on Iron Man Three - really funny stuff. Gold stars to every moment in the Superman and Batman coffee break

Into The... Trainwreck?

For those of you who've had the pleasure of seeing Stephen Sondheim's classic Into the Woods (1986) on stage, you know that, like most of the great composer's once-prolific oeuvre, it is very particularly a Work of Theater. Some artists' skill sets transfer easily between stage, screen, television and literature and so on but others do not. Certain geniuses are so tied to a particular medium they become it; Stephen Sondheim IS Musical Theater. 

But musical theater is different from musical cinema. Naturally compromises will have to be made. The person doing the new compromising is Rob Marshall who Hollywood is still giving the musicals to, presumably because of the huge success of Chicago (2002) and not the floppery of Nine (2009). So yes, compromises must be made...  but they do not have to be made in casting. Many star actors -- if you're forced to cast that way -- have great singing voices. Les Misérables may have botched its casting of Javert (Ugh. Russell Crowe) but elsewhere Tom Hooper seemed to understand that beautiful melodic musical-friendly trained voices were required and could be found in big stars (Hathaway, Hackman, Seyfried) and rising ones (Tveit & Redmayne) and he cast accordingly... except for that bit about letting Helena Bonham-Carter "sing" again post-Sweeney Todd.

Unfortunately Hollywood loves to repeat its mistakes and somehow Sweeney Todd did NOT result in Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter being lifetime banned from future musicals ...

Click to read more ...

Funny Linky People

Drama
Mashable on the glory of the Oscar envelopes. May they never go digital 
The Village Voice Nick Pinkerton remembers the late great critic Andrew Sarris 
The Advocate ten reasons to watch the Oscars on Sunday. (I linked to the most succinct universal one!)
MovieLine taxi cab survey of who will win the Oscars. It's not the names that will  be called out when the envelopes are open. (New Yorkers apparently still think Lincoln is going to sweep!) 

Horror
THR a director votes on the Oscars. In detail. (I know you've probably read this already but just in case... there's a lot to discuss) 
Salon will Jack Nicholson be presenting Best Picture yet again on Sunday night? (As I've long complained and long tried to help them the Oscar producers never have any imagination in this one area)
Slate announces that the musical genre is never coming back by essentially changing the argument of what people who say it's back mean when they say, "the musical genre is back!" Yes, agreed, the movie musical genre will never be what it was back when it was the most popular genre and everyone knew the showtunes. But do not agree that it's not back. We've had a steady clip of musicals ever since that glorious one two three punch of Hedwig, Dancer in the Dark and Moulin Rouge! got the ball rolling again just over a decade ago.

Comedy
The Onion "Johnny Depp now made entirely of scarves and bracelets"
Happy Place the six types of people who watch the Oscars - this is a fun concept but it leaves out too many types... including Oscar Fanatics who are busy cataloguing it all in their head to reference for years and years to come. Hypothetically speaking. I've heard those people exist.
Vulture Best Picture as pie charts. I didn't want to like this -- i wasn't in a snark mood -- but they're funny 
Babble six year olds judge the Oscars by their posters... kids say the darndest things. Some are alarmingly accurate but I love that Les Misérables is about faeires and Argo is an earthquake... teehee. My favorite might be Silver Linings Playbook...

This is a movie about building things and it's a happy, good movie. The two people are inventors that invent things that have to do with fish because of all those little scribbles that look like fish. They work together. He's also really, really tall and she likes to wear her hair really, really high.

Hee. I would totally see a movie about Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence inventing fishy paraphenalia. She's right that Bradley Cooper is tall ~ 6'1"!

Review: "Dark Shadows"

This article was originally published at Towleroad in my weekly column

Chloë Grace Moretz is judging you!

With the world too busy seeing The Avengers (reviewed) for a second time last weekend, Dark Shadows premiered to considerably less fanfare and bank than Tim Burton and Johnny Depp collaborations are generally greeted with. So who will even notice that we're one week late to the ball? Young Carolyn Stoddard (Chloë Grace Moretz) will -- she's so smugly superior -- but she prefers the word "happening". She's quick to school her out-of-time vampire uncle Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) that no one throws "balls" anymore.  

Actually, Carolyn, Tim Burton does...

Click to read more ...