Despite the fact that there was a fair amount of Evan Almighty doomcasting going into the weekend, most of this morning's box office reports spin the sequel's $32.3 million take as low enough to qualify as a shock.
Gregg Kilday's writeup for the Hollywood Reporter arrives with the headline "Low tide for Universal's 'Almighty' bow"; the story goes on to acknowledge that Universal is in the odd of position of "battling a perception" that the weekend's number 1 film is a failure. "[W]hile the movie might have represented the best showing ever for newly minted star Carell -- surpassing the $21.4 million opening of The 40-Year-Old Virgin in 2005 -- Evan now must prove itself in the face of those who already are pointing to it as the first big-budget victim of the summer."
Box Office Mojo directly contrasted Evan's debut to Bruce Almighty's record-setting $68 million bow, ultimately blaming Evan's "all wet" performance on its lack of fantasy appeal--who wants to live vicariously through a dutiful subject of God?
Besides [Jim] Carrey, Bruce Almighty had a broadly-appealing premise"what if you were God?"whereas Evan Almighty was less secular, riffing on a specific story from the Bible. Evan also suffered from passivity. Carell's put upon in the movie, whereas Carrey was empowered to do whatever he wanted in Bruce, from circumventing everyday annoyances to flights of fancy.
On her Deadline Hollywood blog, Nikki Finke's headline paired Evan's "failure" with a 65% drop for last weekend's number one film, Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer, but devoted the bulk of her write-up to flogging Universal yet again for spending $200 million on a movie with limited appeal outside of faith-based audiences. Interestingly, when Finke's blog post was picked up for syndication by The Huffington Post, Arianna and friends ran with the headline, "Jolie's "Mighty Heart" Tanks At The Box Office" -- inflating three sentences of Finke's lengthy evaluation into a tabloid-appropriate distortion. Finke would not be one to shy away from accusing a movie star's vanity project of having "tanked" if that was indeed the case, but she doesn't really go there; she's actually relatively gentle on Heart, characterizing its low gross as a counter-programming move gone wrong.
Finally, at Cinematical, Ryan Stewart interprets 1408's 2nd-place, $20 million bow as a potentially fatal blow to the R-rated horror wave:
1408, which is PG-13, had one of the biggest horror openings in a while, and was noticeably more successful than Eli Roth's torture-fest, Hostel: Part II. [...] The studio lemmings will not miss this weekend's 1408 surprise, and, if they are persuaded that PG-13 is the wave of the future, they might put the kibosh on any number of R-rated horror films in the works.
Those lemmings are also unlikely to miss being called "lemmings".
Originally posted on:
SpoutBlog