Random Topic Generator II

Weekend Box Office. Yes, I know. The 40 Year-Old Virgin [sic] beat Red Eye. Can you tell I don't want to talk about it? Okay, let's move on.

Premiere Summer Predictions. Today seems like as good a day as any to see how Premiere did predicting which movies would make up the summer's top ten. No, they didn't try to predict which ten movies would be the summer's ten best. What would be the point of that? And who would buy a magazine obsessed with such nonsense? Yes, me neither.

Here are the ten movies Premiere foresaw cleaning up this summer, followed by their grosses to date and some insightful commentary.

Revenge of the Sith
Predicted gross: $400 million
Gross to date: $378 million
Snarky comment: Nice try, Premiere, but you were off by a whopping $22 million! You could stuff The Devil's Rejects into that gap more than three times!

Madagascar
Predicted gross: $240 million
Gross to date: $190 million
Snarky comment? Eh, maybe not. After all, this is the lone movie among Premiere's predictions that satisfied my definition of profitability.

War of the Worlds
Predicted gross: $180 million
Gross to date: $230 million
Snarky comment: A string of video-game interstitials separated by shots of a weepy, gurning Tom Cruise. That people paid to watch over and over.

Batman Begins
Predicted gross: $150 million
Gross to date: $202 million
Snarky comment: You blew it by $52 million, Premiere! Wow, that's the budgets of The 40 Year-Old Virgin [sic] and Red Eye combined!

Kingdom of Heaven
Predicted gross: $130 million
Gross to date: $47 million
Snarky comment: Read the last paragraph here.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith
Predicted gross: $125 million
Gross to date: $183 million
Snarky comment: This one stands as one of my favorites of the summer, but it depresses me that it cost $110 million to produce. Made for a little bit less, it could've turned a nice profit.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Predicted gross: $120 million
Gross to date: $192 million
Snarky comment: Somehow, Johnny Depp's nutjob thing is getting him over. Good for him, I guess. But I'm sticking with Gene Wilder.

Stealth
Predicted gross: $115 million
Gross to date: $31 million
Snarky comment: I can only assume that whoever made this prediction has a certain fondness for Jessica Biel.

Fantastic Four
Predicted gross: $110 million
Gross to date: $150 million
Snarky comment: Did someone get paid to make these predictions?! For $40 million, you could've made...! Okay, I'll stop that now.

Cinderella Man
Predicted gross: $105 million
Gross to date: $61 million
Snarky comment: Go here.

The movies that Premiere didn't think would be summer hits are the comedies The Longest Yard and Wedding Crashers, which so far have grossed $157 million and $178 million, respectively.

Broken Flowers. Until recently, Jim Jarmusch's domestic top-grosser was Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai, which in 2000 managed to scrape together $3.3 million in very limited release (its highest theater count was 109). In fact, Jarmusch's twenty-five-year career is a small miracle, given the failure of his movies to earn much more than $2 million or so each.

With Broken Flowers, however, Jarmusch has a bona fide hit on his hands. Released on August 5, the movie has already earned nearly $6 million. Furthermore, it's being pushed aggressively by its distributor, Focus Features, which opened the movie at 27 theaters and now has it playing at 389. With further expansion and continued support, it's not hard to imagine the movie grossing over $20 million -- more than the combined domestic grosses of all of Jarmusch's previous movies.

Focus Features. Unfortunately, Focus is a unit of Universal. If Fox Searchlight had released Broken Flowers, I'd be predicting a $40-million gross without a worry in the world.

Lastly, Tom Robinson is Dead.