The Round Up : 8.31.2008

Here’s the weekend’s box office estimates for the “last” weekend of summer!

1. Tropic Thunder $11.5 million
2. Babylon A.D. $9.7 million
3. The Dark Knight $8.7 million
4. The House Bunny $8.3 million
5. Traitor $7.9 million

Tropic Thunder wins the weekend! Congratulations to Ben Stiller and the boys on that one, there was a point on Friday where the talk was about Babylon A.D. taking the number one spot but alas, it must settle for number two. Is this the first time a Vin Diesel movie didn’t debut at number one? OH – before I forget – this being a holiday weekend, there’s still one more day to go to find out exactly what will happen, so if you’re a Vin Diesel fan then you’ve got one more day to hope.

The Dark Knight passes the $500 million mark this weekend, and is the first picture since Titanic to do so. It’s also notable that it took Titanic thirteen weeks (apparently 13 actually is the luckiest number of all!) to cross that mark and has only taken the Dark Knight six weeks to do so! Six weeks is crazy, y’all. At that point you start to think that absolutely everyone has seen this movie, but it’s ticket sales only declined 17% in it’s seventh weekend! This (in regards to grosses) is going to be the movie of the year.

The House Bunny hung in there for number four! I, for one am interested in seeing how this movie will affect Anna Faris’ career. I think she’ll be the go to woman for comedy in the coming months.

Traitor impressively earned the number five spot, thanks to its stars Don Cheadle and Guy Pearce. I know I was on holiday for a bit this summer, but how did I not know this movie was being released this weekend?! And why did it take me until Friday to recognize that it was, in fact, Guy Pearce in all those pictures? The man is a chameleon! So much so, that when the director Jeffrey Nachmanoff wanted to cast him and was meeting him for lunch, he walked right past him! Guy Pearce was all “Jeff? I’m Guy Pearce.” Well done, Guy, well done.

I debated for quite some time whether or not to bring this up, and ultimately decided to stick to my guns. A couple of days ago, I was reading a newspaper. Hell, it was the LA Times. In general, I’d have to say that the LA Times is much better than ever, especially it’s coverage of the Entertainment Industry (the Industry in LA), whether it be business or reviews. Good stuff goes on over there. But last week they published an article about this summer’s movies, in order to determine each major studio’s biggest successes and flops. Not in the business section where a discussion like that belongs, but in the Calendar section. My other issue was in the writer’s math. I firmly believe, and The Round Up section of this site attests to this, that the way to determine when something is a financial success or failure is to ask what percentage of its budget was made back, and what that percentage means in actual dollars. That is all that matters financially, ask any studio head. The writer spoke about Disney, saying their biggest hit was Wall•E (which it was) and that Swing Vote was their biggest flop (which it wasn’t). This happens all the time, and is frustrating because it makes the jobs of the people who actually make movies much more difficult to continue doing so. To remind everyone, especially that writer who I am sure is reading today after the email I sent him, Swing Vote cost Disney $20 million, and has made $15 million so far. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian has made $140 million and cost just north of $200 million to make. I know, I know, only by a small margin percentage wise, Prince Caspian was the bigger financial flop. But consider this: Swing Vote has only lost Disney $5 million, while Prince Caspian has lost them $60 million! I hate to get all aggressive on his ass, but sometimes you just have to bring it.

And that’s the weekend!



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