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.
You knew Twilight was going to earn boatloads this weekend. But how did films not starring vampires do? Terrible. Below, your Top Five movies.
1. Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 (weekend: $139.5 million) Breaking Dawn couldn't quite top the Twilight franchise's previous biggest debut (New Moon opened to $142.8 million in 2009), but it did set the record for best-ever North American first weekend for a movie in which a vampire delivers a demon baby via C-section with his own teeth (discounting inflation). Eighty percent of Dawn's audience was female, which is less than we might have guessed.
2. Happy Feet Two (weekend: $22 million)
Despite a voice cast that includes Matt Damon and Brad Pitt, and a boost from 3D tickets, this dancing-penguins sequel (budget: $135 million) opened to half of what the 2006 original did — and next weekend, families will presumably opt for The Muppets. Happy Feet Three: probably not happening.
Last week, in anticipation of tonight's premiere of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1, fans of the franchise erected a tent city outside of Los Angeles' Nokia Theatre, just across the street from Grantland HQ. Who would give up a week's worth of work or school, sleep, and indoor plumbing just to watch a few pale actors walk a red carpet? Yesterday, armed with a camera and a tape recorder, we decided to find out. Unfortunately, Twilight stars Peter Facinelli and Jackson Rathbone were visiting at the same time, so many of the female fans were preoccupied. Luckily, there were plenty of men around to answer our questions.
You know, despite our advancing age we like to think of ourselves as marginally “with it.” We knew what Jay-Z was talking about when he resurrected “snapbacks” in “Otis” — mainly because we still had them in the back of our closets from the first time they were cool — and we know that LMFAO stands for something you shouldn’t say aloud in polite company or at least during an NPR pledge drive. But lord almighty does this trailer for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 (!) make us feel a thousand years old — and not in a hip, Cullen sort of way, either.
Or, rather, will it be a supporting vampire, or a supporting werewolf? With its plentiful stock of wolfcake and bloodsuckers, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 is a bonanza for a category that’s often among the Razzies’ most predictable. Due to a fluke of scheduling, though, the name-brand Supporting Actors the Razzies typically love — Burt Reynolds, Marlon Wayans, Verne Troyer, Jon Voight, and (of course) Rob Schneider — have zero movies due to be released in 2011. That means some fresh Razzie meat come January 23!
Will Jackson Rathbone follow up his shocking Razzie win last year with another nomination? Might Taylor Lautner have better luck in Supporting Actor than he did in Worst Actor last year, when he lost to Ashton Kutcher? What about Kellan Lutz as vampire Emmett, the most bloodless of the bunch? Or Michael Sheen as Aro, who seems prepared to devour the scenery like so many shrieking coeds? Or Jamie Campbell Bower, who … uh … we can’t remember who “Caius” is. At any rate, they’re all front-runners, so let’s put them there.
What do Stanley Kubrick, John Huston, Sylvester Stallone, and Prince have in common? They’ve all been nominated for a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Director! The Razzies have always prided themselves on nominating a mix of directors for the industry’s biggest prize. Sure, actors (Kevin Costner, Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy) who step behind the camera are always favorites. But the Razzies voters seem to enjoy taking auteurs and top-notch pros down a peg, as well; by RazzieWatch’s count, 14 directors have been nominated for the Oscar for Best Director and the Razzie for Worst Director.
Worst Actress is traditionally the most difficult Razzie category to predict, because the performances are the most widely varied. Will nominations go to Oscar nominees slumming it (as when Diane Keaton was nominated for 2007’s Because I Said So)? Or will it go to the forgettable female “lead” in an action movie (as in Megan Fox’s nominations the past two years, for Jonah Hex and Transformers 2)? Or will a single nomination go to a whole group of ladies (the casts of Sex and the City 2, The Women, and Bratz: The Movie) in a manner that doesn’t at all suggest that the Razzies find all women and movies about women interchangeable and icky?
It’s hard to believe 2011 is already half gone! It seems like just yesterday that the cold of winter had descended upon us as we celebrated The Last Airbender and its five Razzie wins. But now we’ve finished off our Fourth of July hot dogs and legally purchased fireworks, and just as all the finest Oscar blogs are rolling out their early-bird 2011 predictions, so too is it time for RazzieWatch to step out on a limb and make some bold guesses. Which films will achieve Razzie glory come January 23?
In the coming weeks we’ll predict the acting awards and other categories. But today we'll start with the big kahuna: Worst Picture!
It’s June, which means that Hollywood is readying another buffet of crap. Endless superhero sagas, pointless remakes, a third Transformers movie — 2011 just might be the worst summer movie season ever. But a lousy summer for movie-watchers is a great summer for Razzie-watchers, because everyone knows that summer is Razzie season.
The Razzies, of course, are the coveted Golden Raspberry awards, the brainchild of Los Angeles PR man John Wilson, who turned an Oscar-party roast of bad movies into a 30-year cottage industry celebrating the worst Tinseltown has to offer. The Razzies (dis)honor Hollywood the day before the Academy Awards in a ceremony that has even occasionally attracted some star power. (Two years ago Sandra Bullock accepted her Worst Actress Razzie for All About Steve in person, her good sportsmanship aided, no doubt, by the fact that she was a lock to win an Oscar for The Blind Side the next day.)
