DELLAMORTE’S BOX OFFICE WRAP UP 2/11/11

This just in: A vaccine for the highly contagious Bieber fever.

There are ways in which I was more dead-on this week than any other source for box office, in that both my number one and two were within spitting distance of each other and within a reasonable margin of error. I was within a half a million for Just Go With It, and a little more with the Bieber film. The place I was most off was the number three film, Gnomeo and Juliet. I thought it wouldn’t perform because it was terrible, and tracking is sometimes low for animated films (you can’t track kids). I was wrong. The absence of kids films (other than Tangled and Yogi Bear) likely had the same impact of putting a kink in a water-hose, or – for men – like taking a couple days off from sex. Increased pressure.

Just Go With It opened to the number one spot, but Adam Sandler films often open within this range. Actually, this is a little soft for something that should have had more breathing room. The audience for it is not the same as Justin Bieber, so it should have had a clear run. Perhaps the family-friendly audiences of Bieber and Gnomeo kept married couples from seeing Sandler, and perhaps the film – though it has children in it – had too much jiggling Brooklyn Decker to make it seem that great a date film. Where the film will likely get to $100 domestic, this isn’t a big win and that might be a slow crawl. This seems to say more about this film and Sandler than Sony, as they likely have a close to hands off approach. With Sandler and Anniston and Company getting their quotes, I don’t know if a hundred is enough to keep these films profitable. Perhaps Sandler still does well in TV sales and such. But there’s a bunch of talent here that didn’t do this on the cheap. Likely this will be a modest success, but Sandler is still reliable in terms of box office even if this is a little soft. Jennifer Aniston doesn’t seem to register at the box office. And perhaps there is modest kick-back from Grown Ups, but that played long, so it would seem relatively popular.

The question with the Justin Bieber picture is “how front loaded is it?” Even when the Friday $12.5 million daily total came in, no one thought the picture was going to take the weekend. The film will likely collapse next weekend so the question is if it can double its opening. As a concert/not-that-expensive film, it should already be in profit, so that’s good, but like the brand FUBU, Bieber plays to an audience that is very specific and one that doesn’t encourage outsiders, so much as keeps them away. Anyone who is curious about Justin Bieber can do so without spending ten dollars or more, though it strikes me that the To Catch a Predator guys would do well to stake out the theaters showing this film. Then again, I asked some people who worked as Disneyland if they had many problems with perverts, and I was told it was a rare occurrence.

Gnomeo and Juliet opened, and may actually do closer to $100 than not. This is a big win for the movie, but also suggests that the right time can make a certain type of film successful. And with the 3-D boost, the film has made that end gross that much fatter. They’ve got until March 4 when Beastly and Rango hit, and then the next week there’s Mars Needs Moms, so there’s definitely competition coming, but that’s two more weeks of light competition for the ten and under set. The Eagle looked like a miss, and Channing Tatum’s on the way down of the attempts to launch him. Hopefully 21 Jump Street will raise his stakes/make him viable again. Otherwise, the film should disappear quickly, and the Tatum experiment has been met with mostly mixed results.

The Roomate didn’t crumble as quick as I thought, so $40 isn’t out of range, and The King’s Speech is about six days away from crossing the hundred million dollar mark. No Strings should be able to peter out over $70 million, Sanctum sunk (tum?) and won’t do much more than $20 Million, while True Grit is still playing and crossed $160 Million this weekend. The Green Hornet likely still has enough strength to get to $100, but that’ll be it. Out of the top ten, Black Swan is less than a million away from $100, and both it and The Fighter are still kicking (or punching, if that works better for you). This is the worst season for films of the year.