Saturday Box Office: SuperBad Dips, but Still Headed for $31M
The Judd Apatow-produced SUPERBAD (Sony), written by KNOCKED UP star Seth Rogan and directed by Greg Mottola (THE DAYTRIPPERS), couldn’t hold up the furious box office pace it set on Friday, but, even with its estimated 12% Friday-to-Saturday drop, the raucous teen comedy still delivered a very solid $10.64M. With an anticipated $8.5M on Sunday, SUPERBAD will wrap up the weekend with a phenomenal $31.24M.
RUSH HOUR 3 (New Line) added a stronger than expected $8.7M on Saturday, and the Tucker/Chan/Ratner action-comedy has a revised 3-day estimate of $20.81M. That’s a 58% drop as opposed to the expected 60% drop that was
expected. It’s likely that a fair number of teens bought tickets to see RH3, then crossed over to see the R-rated SUPERBAD. THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM (Universal), also PG13-rated, may have also been boosted by kids crossing over to see Jonah Hill, Michael Cera and friends. The Damon/Greengrass thriller grabbed approximately $7.93M on Saturday, and BOURNE’s 3rd weekend will likely be $18.7M or so, just a 43% dip.
Joel Silver’s mess THE INVASION (Warner Bros) only managed $2.14M on its 2nd day of release. The $75M body snatcher tale, starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, is headed for a miserable $5.5M weekend. The film, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel (DOWNFALL), was supposed to be released last year, but Warner Bros and Silver didn’t like the original cut. So, Silver called in the Wachowski brothers (The MATRIX Trilogy) and James McTeigue (V FOR VENDETTA), who added some action sequences. In the end, nobody could salvage this misfire.
MGM/Weinstein’s THE LAST LEGION continued to sputter through its opening weekend with an estimated $957,000 Saturday. With a cast that includes Ben Kingsley, Anthony Hopkins, Colin Firth and Bollywood superstar Aishwarya Rai, the film may sell tickets abroad, but it will finish the weekend with just $2.49M.
There was more good news for the well-reviewed MGM comedy DEATH AT A FUNERAL, directed by Frank Oz (IN & OUT, DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS). The US Comedy Arts Festival winner on 260 screens picked up another $530,000 or so. The dark comedy will have banked $1.23M by Monday morning.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s THE 11TH HOUR (Warner Independent) suffered a 37% Friday-to-Saturday drop at its 4 locations, but it will still finish the weekend with an estimated $62,000. Its $15,531 PTA is the best of the weekend, edging gritty Brazilian doc MANDA BALA: SEND A BULLET (Slowhand Releasing) with $12,185 on its single screen and SUPERBAD with a PTA of $10,483.
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Quentin Tarantino’s My Best Friend’s Birthday
Have you ever seen Quentin Tarantino’s first film? No, not Reservoir Dogs. I’m talking about My Best Friend’s Birthday. Never heard of it? Well now you can watch it.
Part 1:
Part 2:
The history of the film (with help from Wikipedia):
My Best Friend’s Birthday is an unfinished black and white independent film by Craig Hamann and Quentin Tarantino, shot during their younger days while working at the now shuttered Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, California. The project started in 1984, when Hamann wrote a short 30-40 page script about a young man who continually tries to do something nice for his friend’s birthday, only to have his efforts backfire.
The short screenplay expanded into an 80 page feature length script. On an estimated budget of $5,000, they shot the movie on 16mm over the course of the next four years. The original cut of the film was about 70 minutes long but due to a fire only 36 minutes of the film survived. The 36 minute cut has been shown at several film festivals but has has never been officially released.
Elements of My Best Friend’s Birthday were reused by Tarantino in his later films; most notably in his script for Tony Scott’s 1993 film True Romance, which contained a more developed version of the Clarence character, a call-girl character, and the famous Elvis monologue which Tarantino originally performed in the film himself.
The Wachowski Brothers Rework The Invasion
We previously reported that The Wachowski Brothers were brought in to work on some reshoot material for the upcoming BodysnatchesThe Invasion remake . Well apparently there is MUCH much more to this story. Our friends over at Collider claim that the Brothers were brought in to rewrite over 70% of the movie. Here is what happened.
When an early rough cut studio screening of The Invasion tested poorly, Warner Bros demanded reshoots. The original cut was more of an artsy/talky film, and not the summer tent-pole action film Warner was hoping for. But director Oliver Hirschbiegel was “unavailable” (or most likely not wanted), Joel Silver brought in his Matrix pals to shoot a new ending. This is the story we already knew. But what we didn’t know was that the Wachowski Brothers actually rewrote more than 2/3rds of the film, and brought in their trusted colleague and V For Vendetta director James Mcteigue to finish the movie.
I don’t know exactly how true this new story is. We do know that the reshoots took place sometime between October 2006 and February 2007. Even if they only re-shot for two months, that would have given them enough time to redo a huge chunk of the movie. So it is very possible. But if Mcteigue reshot so much of the film, why is Hirschbiegel being given the sole director screen credit? And could the resulting film be anything less than a mess?