After a grim $11 million opening on Friday, the most recent film industry assessments have the reboot pegged as completing the weekend with an insignificant $28 million dollars.
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“Fantastic Four” opened on Thursday evening and picked up a “lukewarm” $2.7M.
But the most telling line is uttered by Reed, who expresses his dismay upon discovering that soulless bureaucrats have somehow rebuilt his beloved teleportation device while he was away: “You made it ugly”, he kvetches, in a sentiment that will no doubt be shared by those of us who wonder why it’s so darn hard to tell this story.
Lionsgate rolled out “Shaun the Sheep” final week.
“The confluence of clearly the decidedly negative reviews with the combination of social media did not help the cause”, said Fox distribution chief Chris Aronson. We may never definitively know whether Trank was “erratic” or abusive on set, as was reported and rumored, or whether he became uncommunicative with studio heads (let alone whether he actually trashed the Louisiana home he was squatting at for six-figure damage – mythology grows around this big a mess). Meanwhile, Victor has developed telekinetic abilities and morphed into the diabolical Dr. Doom, a villain more powerful than any of the “Fantastic Four” individually, but not collectively.
The Marvel superhero film opened this weekend to an estimated $26.2 million at the U.S. box office – way under the $40 million experts had predicted. “Rogue Nation“, in its second week at No.1, earned $29.4 million to pass the $100 million mark. That works for something like Batman or Iron Man, but for heroes like Spiderman, Superman or The Fantastic Four? The psychological thriller, in which he stars alongside Rebecca Hall and Jason Bateman, received great reviews and scored with audiences, earned $12 million for third, a healthy early return on a $5 million budget and another success for the Blumhouse team and fledgling studio STX Entertainment. The second half of the movie jumps ahead a year after our heroes get their powers, and we don’t get to see them discovering how to use them, which is usually the best part of any origin story. The Jonathan Demme-directed flick is clearly an adult demo and strongly skewed to a female audience so it might have a good multiple as Sony is expected to add more theaters in the coming weeks.
The Fantastic Four was no match indeed for the Relentless One that is the stunt-happy Mr. Cruise; his latest “Mission: Impossible” sequel is nearing $110-million in domestic take. But those dreams were dashed by the critically-roasted and now commercially ignored movie we have before us. He’s under contract for one more solo Wolverine film, supposedly set to film next year, and then he’s done. The break-even point is at approximately $15 million, making it a low-risk investment.
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It’s high stakes, high-risk filmmaking to be sure, because you just know that the legions of online critics and pitch-fork carrying fanboys will attack and critique your comic book revisionism from a myriad of angles. $4.3 million of that weekend total was grossed on 369 domestic IMAX screens with another $3.5 million internationally for a global IMAX total of just under $25 million to date.
