Some serious behind-the-scenes drama is about to go down over at ABC’s hit comedy Modern Family. That’s right, ladies and gentleman: It's contract renegotiation time.
With zero new films in wide release, this weekend was won (again) by Breaking Dawn, fast on its way to earning all of the world's money. Below, your Top Five movies.
1. Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 (weekend: $16.9 million; total: $247.3 million)
Jesus, Twilight fans. Enough! Topping the box office for the third consecutive weekend is fourquel Breaking Dawn, which has already earned more than half a billion dollars worldwide despite being even worse than the previous three Twilight movies.
The box-office slump continues as not even vampires, Muppets, and a 3-D kids' movie about film preservation could prevent a 12 percent drop in grosses from last year's five-day Thanksgiving weekend. Below, your Top Five movies.
1. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1 (weekend: $62.3 million; total: $221.3 million)
Teenage America saved money on turkey over the weekend, opting for this appetite-suppressing sequel starring Robert Pattinson as a sparkly midwife who delivers a demon baby via C-section with his teeth. Breaking Dawn's 10-day take is good but down a bit from that of 2008's less disgusting New Moon, which made $230.9 million in its first two weekends without chewing through any umbilical cords.
It's Friday and Hollywood has disgorged another batch of movies into multiplexes. Which will reign supreme and why? Below, our predictions for the Top 5 films at this weekend's box office.
Critics say it's terrible, but that won't matter to the fanatical, unshowered hordes who've been camped out in front of theaters for a week without access to bathrooms or Rotten Tomatoes. The plots of previous Twilight movies have mostly revolved around Edward and Bella gazing boringly into each others' dead eyes. But Breaking Dawn features a wedding, a sex scene, and a womb-shredding demon baby, so tracking indicates its first-weekend gross to hit triple-digit Harry Potter numbers.
Prediction: $135 million
The problem with haunted-house stories are that the solution seems so obvious: just leave the house. Put it on Craigslist and find a good real estate agent sometime between after the faucet starts leaking blood and before you ever explore the screams coming from the basement. Sell your car and move into a beige condo with one bathroom. Leave while you have your life, and figure the rest out later.
American Horror Story, however — the everything bagel of haunted-house sagas — seems a more relevant and less impossible scenario now than it ever would have before: it is more difficult to leave a house, if you’re lucky enough to be in the shrinking group of people who have the money and confidence to buy one in the first place, than it was before the housing crisis began. Selling your home, especially one with jars of babies in the basement and constant solicitations from a disfigured man who needs money for his acting head shots, is difficult; finding another place while your haunted mansion sits on the market makes the reluctance to leave even more forceful. The Harmons, the family around which AHS revolves, are struggling financially, and of course, like many supernaturally staged homes with kitchen islands of horror, the house has an additional psychological pull on them that makes them stay. Dylan McDermott’s character Ben runs his psychiatric practice from the house, no longer able to afford an office, and it would be understandably difficult to see patients in a tiny corporate apartment. They’re stuck — stuck in a modern way.
It's Friday and Hollywood has disgorged another batch of movies into multiplexes. Which will reign supreme and why? Below, our predictions for the Top 5 films at this weekend's box office.
Leonardo DiCaprio puts on a rubbery old-guy mask and even less plausible accent to play the titular FBI director in Clint Eastwood's latest biopic, which expands nationally today. Eastwood's movies usually do better when the director is in front of the camera, but Edgar has made an impressive $53,000 in limited release since Wednesday, plus what else do your parents have to do this weekend?
Prediction: $10 million.
It wasn't just new releases Tower Heist and Harold & Kumar 3 that disappointed this weekend — it was everything: total box-office receipts were down 30 percent from the same three-day period a year ago. "The fear is that our total business is in the toilet,” a studio exec tells Nikki Finke. Before we flush, though, a look at what happened. Here are your Top 5 movies.
1. Puss in Boots (weekend: $33 million; $75.5 million total)
In PiB's second weekend at No. 1, grosses for the Shrek spin-off fell just three percent, which is the smallest-ever box-office drop for a non-Holiday release. For which the industry credits last week's snow on the East Coast, which depressed Boots' opening, and the fact that parents were no less desperate this weekend to make their kids shut up for 90 minutes.
2. Tower Heist (weekend: $25.1 million)
Despite good reviews (for a Brett Ratner movie), the film in which Eddie Murphy gives his funniest performance since Bowfinger debuted below expectations, probably because most of the people who still remember Murphy's performance in Bowfinger took their grandchildren to see Puss in Boots (62 percent of Heist's audience was 30 or older).
Look, we’re not saying AMC is broke. (That’s so last month!) We’re sure the upstart prestige netlet is just doing just fine financially. Between their recent stock offering and their new line of licensed The Killing ponchos (“Because when it rains it pours.”) the channel should have no trouble keeping Matt Weiner in vintage stoves for at least another decade.
When Kanye and Jay-Z's Watch The Throne made it all the way to its release date last Monday without leaking, the music industry sat up and spat out its caviar breakfast. How did such a high-profile album stay safe? The answer was the pair's bonkers commitment to security: They released Throne digitally via iTunes first, so nobody could steal a copy from a warehouse. And Jay-Z and Kanye recorded together only in person and in non-studio settings like hotels and Australian mansions, meaning no tracks were emailed between hackable accounts and no studio hangers-on could get sticky fingers. And most important of all, during the process, Kanye’s engineers saved all the songs to external hard drives that, Billboard reports, “[could] only be accessed by biometric fingerprint readers.” So how did all of this pay off sales-wise?
Rise of the Planet of the Apes rose right to the top of the box office over the weekend, shocking Hollywood and proving once and for all that America prefers animals acting like people to people acting like animals. How did a monkey movie with a laughable trailer and an oddball, animalistic Oscar campaign make $54 million in its opening weekend (a lusty $20m more than its own studio had predicted) and win over a nation of humanity-hating critics? Just as we do when things go shockingly wrong, we asked an agent, a producer, and a publicist just why and how things went surprisingly right.
It seemed like a sure bet: put Paul Blart star Kevin James in a movie full of celebrity-voiced zoo animals, crank up the air conditioning, and let the money roll in. But in its first weekend, Zookeeper opened to a measly $21 million, barely meeting its studio's lowered-expectations and finishing in third place behind an R-rated comedy starring Kevin Spacey. What happened? Was it the clumsy marketing? A bad release date? Crappy reviews? Maybe. Our best guess, though? The animals were too big.
We haven’t been paying close enough attention to Johnny Depp. Over the past decade, while we weren’t looking, he somehow starred in no less than 40 percent of the 10 highest-grossing films in world box-office history, allowing him to purchase a private island with beaches named after Hunter S. Thompson and Marlon Brando. And his inherent quirkiness — once so beloved by protohipsters and Winona Ryder — has been spectacularly monetized: Slap a wig, some gaudy jewelry , or a Michael Jackson imitation on him, and suddenly the former bad boy is transformed into the surest thing in Hollywood.
