The Screengrab : the chronicles of narnia

Screengrab Predicts: The Top 5 Hits of Summer 2009 (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Yes, it’s that magical time of year once more...as my late lamented Grampa Joe would say, quoting his favorite Brooklyn poet: “Spring is sprung, the grass is riz, I wonder where the flowers iz? All the boids is the on the wing...isn’t that absoid? I thought the wing was on the boid!”

All of which is neither here nor there...but the real point is we’re just days away from the start of the Summer Blockbuster Season (which, like the Christmas season, keeps starting earlier and earlier each year, what with the upcoming May 1 release of Wolverine, the May 8 release of Star Trek...heck, even Vin Diesel’s already had a summer blockbuster, and we’re barely into baseball season!

And, since Hollywood now refuses to wait until Memorial Day Weekend to start firing off its big guns, your pals here at the Screengrab have no choice but to launch into the fray with our second annual attempt to prognosticate the Top 5 Biggest Hits & Bombs of 2009!

Now, for those of you playing along at home, the rules are simple: the following “HIT” and “BOMB” predictions aren’t necessarily based on the sheer volume of money we think the following films will amass, but rather how their performance will ultimately be perceived by the Suits in Hollywood and the public at large. So, for example, last year we predicted Prince Caspian would be a hit...but it cost more and took in less than The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe, so it was ultimately considered a disappointment. Meanwhile, Sex & The City, which...ahem...some Screengrabbers thought would bomb took in about the same amount of money as Caspian and was ultimately considered a hit because all the wimmenfolk liked it so much (and also because it didn’t cost a zillion dollars to produce, despite all the CGI required to bring the eerie Kim Cattrall character to life).

And so, without further ado...our picks for THE TOP FIVE HITS OF SUMMER 2009!

5. UP (May 29)

Paul:
There were several strong possibilities for the #5 spot, but in the end I kept coming back to Pixar, who has managed to balance high-quality output with great box office better than just about anyone else in Hollywood. Consider that all but one of their summer releases has finished among that summer’s top five, and that the one that didn’t -- 2007’s Ratatouille, probably the least kid-friendly Pixar production to date -- landed at #6. So yeah, they’re a pretty good bet, and this family-oriented film should continue their hot streak. The opening weekend for Up could be tight, considering that it’s competing with the second weekend of Night at the Museum 2, but it ought to prevail in the long run given the thin June slate and the expected strong reviews.

Andrew:
This one didn’t make my list because it's got a meh title, I can’t figure out what the movie’s supposed to be about, and I don’t sense a lot of Up excitement in the ether...but then again, I thought Wall-E would tank, too, so what the hell do I know?

Scott:
The pundits are fretting that the new Pixar movie will turn off the kiddies because it’s about an old person. (shudder) How are they going to sell Old Guy action figures? Well, I seem to recall these same pundits wringing their hands over the nearly-silent first half of Wall-E, too, so I’m sticking with the assumption that Pixar knows what they’re doing.

4. ANGELS & DEMONS (May 15)

Paul:
Here’s where things get a little more iffy. A big-budget, star-studded adaptation of a Dan Brown bestseller would seem to be a can’t-lose proposition, especially given the blockbuster grosses of The Da Vinci Code in 2006. Yet so far, the buzz on this one has been surprisingly muted, perhaps because it’s hard to imagine too many people getting worked up over a follow-up to its ponderous predecessor. Nonetheless, expect advertising for this to ramp up over the next month, leading to a big opening weekend followed by strong grosses over Memorial Day, as people line up for this almost out of obligation.

Andrew:
Considering people keep going to see those fake Nicolas Cage Da Vinci Code knock-offs, I expect there’s gonna be an audience for the genuine article. Plus, I’m told everyone and their mother (especially their mother) digs Tom Hanks, and devout filmgoers and atheists alike can all get behind a conspiracy thriller about all the creepy, weird stuff going on behind closed doors at the Vatican, right?

Click Here For The Hits (Part Two), The Bombs (Part Three), The Toss-Ups (Part Four) and The Honorable Mentions (Parts Five & Six)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Paul Clark

Morning Deal Report: Watchmen on Hold?

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 14:30:00 GMT

"A Los Angeles federal judge has ruled that 20th Century Fox owns the distribution rights to Watchmen, representing a setback for Warner Bros.' plans to release the pic in March," Variety reports. So far Warner Bros. still has Watchmen slotted for a March 6th release, but I envision a sitdown with the Fox suits sooner than later.

Walt Disney is getting out of the Narnia business. The studio won't be exercising its option to co-finance The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader with Walden Media. "The third entry in the series, based on the classic books by C.S. Lewis, was in preproduction and set for a spring shoot for a planned May 2010 release. The development puts the participation of the talent attached in doubt," per The Hollywood Reporter.

The Watchmen lawsuit won't slow the flow of comic book movies. "Arcana Studios is developing a feature version of the comicbook series Paradox, which centers on a police detective using unorthodox methods of investigation in a world powered by magic." Watch me pull a warrant out of my hat.

Screengrab 2008 Summer Movie Season Prediction Results!

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Way back on May 1, yours truly and fellow Screengrabbers Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce and Scott Von Doviak made our predictions about the Top 5 Hits and the Top 5 Bombs of Summer 2008. Now, with Labor Day Weekend in our rear-view mirror, I’ve compared our predictions with the box office results and industry perceptions of the past summer season to see how we did (and which one of us has the brightest future as a Hollywood Suit in charge of picking the production slate for Summer ’09)!

But before I get to the results, I should mention that I didn’t calculate based on grosses alone, since industry expectations and the initial (estimated) cost of a film’s production and marketing factor into whether any individual project is generally considered to be a success or a stinker.

That said, our overall batting average was pretty good when it came to picking hits. Four of our consensus picks for the successes of Summer ‘09 turned out to be unqualified hits: The Dark Knight, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Iron Man and Kung Fu Panda. However, our fifth consensus pick, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, is a bit of a sticky wicket. On the one hand, the fantasy flick is the 7th most successful flick of 2008 thus far (according to Wikipedia, anyway), with a theatrical gross of nearly half a billion dollars. On the other hand, it “only” grossed $141-ish million in its domestic run, and generally fell below expectations raised by the Red State driven success of its predecessor, The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe.

So, giving half points to Caspian, Screengrab went 4.5 out of 5 on hit prediction, which ain’t so stanky.

On the other hand, our bomb predictions more or less blew up in our collective face. Oh, sure...most of us could smell The Love Guru and Speed Racer stinkin' up the cineplexes from a mile away, and both films were, in fact, Hindenburgian box office disasters. (Oh, the humanity!)

But our third prediction, The Incredible Hulk, somehow rode the summer superhero wave to a respectable (if not sensational) gross, and our fourth pick, The Happening, while yet another disappointment for M. Night Shyamalan, at least managed to improve on the box office of the writer/director’s previous effort (Lady In The Water) and, thanks to a (relatively) low budget, failed to produce quite as big a crater as expected.

And, like most of Hollywood’s own testosterone-fueled prognosticators, we got caught with our pants down on our fifth pick: Sex and The City, which (like Mama Mia!) flooded America’s theaters with a tidal wave of estrogen, reminding the Suits that if you build good projects for women, they will come.

Thus, we essentially got three out of five of our bomb predictions right, for an overall batting average at LEAST as respectable as any four studio execs making double (triple? quadruple?) our salaries at Universal, Warner Bros., Paramount, etc.

As for our individual scores, I’ve included our original predictions below, annotated to indicate whether the films in question turned out to be unqualified hits (H) or bombs (B). Films that had respectable box office without quite qualifying as full-scale hits (for one reason or another) are identified with an (R), while disappointments that didn’t leave full-scale bomb craters are marked with a (D). And Hellboy II: the Golden Army is a push, since it didn’t exactly light up the box office, but still did better than 2004’s Hellboy.

HIT PREDICTIONS:

Leonard Pierce

1. The Dark Knight (H)

2. Kung Fu Panda (H)

3. Speed Racer (B)

4. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (R)

5. What Happens In Vegas (R)

Scott Von Doviak

1. The Dark Knight (H)

2. Iron Man (H)

3. Hancock (R)

4. Prince Caspian (R)

5. Indiana Jones (H)

Paul Clark

1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (H)

2. Hancock (R)

3. The Dark Knight (H)

4. Wall*E (H)

5. Iron Man (H)

Andrew Osborne

1. Indiana Jones (H)

2. The Dark Knight (H)

3. Prince Caspian (R)

4. Pineapple Express (R)

5. American Teen (D)

BOMB PREDICTIONS:

Leonard Pierce

1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (H)

2. The Incredible Hulk (R)

3. Hancock (R)

4. Get Smart (R)

5. Sex and the City (H)

Scott Von Doviak

1. The Happening (D)

2. Sex and the City (H)

3. You Don’t Mess With the Zohan (R)

4. The Love Guru (B)

5. The Incredible Hulk (R)

Paul Clark

1. Speed Racer (B)

2. The Incredible Hulk (R)

3. The Love Guru (B)

4. Get Smart (R)

5. Wanted (R)/Hellboy II: The Golden Army (Push)

Andrew Osborne

1. The Love Guru

2. The Incredible Hulk (R)

3. Speed Racer (B)

4. Wall*E (H)

5. Hancock (R)

Thus, after totaling our individual scores (with a secret Price-Waterhousian formula too arcane to explain at length), it seems PAUL CLARK is Screengrab’s reigning Chief Prognosticator, with the most accurate Hit AND Miss predictions for Summer ’08.

(Please send any and all cushy studio job offers to Mr. Clark, care of Screengrab@Nerve.com.)

DVD Digest for May 13, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week: two new Criterion DVDs, the comeback effort of a master filmmaker, and the Chairman of the Board all compete for your DVD dollar. Who will win? Why, DVD buyers, of course!

DVD of the Week: For sheer comprehensiveness, nothing can touch Warner’s 22-film, 5-box-set tribute to the one and only Frank Sinatra. For all of Sinatra’s success as a recording artist, he was also a talented actor, given the right role, and this week sees the release of a number of his finest films. Among these are his Oscar-nominated performance in Otto Preminger’s The Man With the Golden Arm and Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running, both of which are included in the Frank Sinatra: The Golden Years box set. But if you prefer Sinatra the fresh-faced young crooner, check out Frank Sinatra: The Early Years, which includes such early-career titles as Step Lively, It Happened in Brooklyn, and The Kissing Bandit. Or see Sinatra match his pipes with Gene Kelly’s nimble feet in The Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly Collection, comprised of the classic musicals On the Town, Take Me Out to the Ballgame, and Anchors Aweigh. And if special features are your thing, there’s always The Rat Pack Ultimate Collector’s Edition, which finds the Chairman at his least inspired vehicles but leaves plenty of room for gawking at swingin’ celebrities of yore. Heck, Warner is even releasing 1993’s miniseries Sinatra on DVD this week, in case you want your Sinatra without all that Sinatra. All that’s missing is Sinatra’s two most acclaimed films, The Manchurian Candidate and From Here to Eternity. But I’m guessing you already own those, right?

As previously mentioned, this week also brings the release of two brand-spankin' new Criterions, Louis Malle’s The Lovers and The Fire Within. Also of note in classics on DVD: The Big Trail: Fox Grandeur Special Edition; the Godard double-feature of La Chinoise (Kino) and Le Gai Savoir; a new edition of Anthony Mann’s Man of the West (Fox); Saturday Night Live: The Complete Third Season (Universal); and the Fox Western Classics Collection, which includes the new-to-DVD titles Garden of Evil, Rawhide, and The Gunfighter. And in shameless cash-in news, this week brings new DVDs of all three Indiana Jones films, with a few added extra features so that buyers won’t feel completely ripped off.

In more recent films, today brings the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth (Sony, also Blu-Ray), his first official directorial effort in a decade. The film was generally regarded as a critical and popular disaster, but I found it fascinating- flawed to be sure, but intriguingly so- and I believe it’ll finally be appreciated for what it is on DVD. Also this week: Diane Lane in Untraceable (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Diane Keaton, Katie Holmes and Queen Latifah in Mad Money (Anchor Bay); and the French horror film Frontier(s) (Lionsgate). The other major new release this week is the DVD debut of The Animation Show 3 (Paramount), last year’s touring program of animated shorts presented by Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt. The DVD includes Hertzfeldt’s latest masterpiece Everything will be OK, as well as sixteen other shorts, some of which have been added especially for the DVD release.

This week’s Blu-Ray only releases are: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Fox); Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Fox); Mrs. Doubtfire (Fox); and just in time for this weekend’s new blockbuster, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Which brings me to this week’s Huddleston corner, in which we sigh over the lonely release of Warner’s One Missed Call on HD-DVD. I mean really, guys- you’re just kidding around now, right?