The View From Here VI

As it turns out, not only is Rachel McAdams a successful and appealing movie star, she's also very much an adult. Today is her twenty-ninth birthday. Well, Roger Ebert and I care. Which is good enough for me.

Unfortunately, it looks like Red Eye will just barely miss out on domestic profitability. The weekend that Flightplan came out, DreamWorks cut Red Eye's theater count by 1,000; and then the following weekend, they cut it by 1,000 more. I don't see the movie squeezing another $7 million out of the few hundred theaters where it's still playing.

Chris wants me to stop picking on Jessica Alba, but I just can't help myself. Into the Blue, John Stockwell's de facto remake of The Deep, opened last weekend at number five, behind Serenity and the new David Cronenberg movie. With a three-day gross of just $7 million, Into the Blue will be lucky to gross $20 million. A box-office disaster, given that it cost $50 million to produce.

Finally, I know I said I was going to rant about Serenity's weak opening, but I'm not sure what I could say that hasn't already been said. One would think that Universal could've squeezed more than $10 million out of a movie with strong reviews and a dedicated fan base. But who knows what color the sky is in Nikki Rocco's world?

At least I can be happy about A History of Violence. It already stands as the first Cronenberg movie since 1986's The Fly to gross more than $10 million. And the odds are good it'll finish its run as the director's highest-grossing movie ever.