wired

Pre-Xmas family doings in Boston and Connecticut and no broadband to dip into last night (i.e., Sunday evening)…so “Elsewhere Live” fell by the wayside. Once you start a twice-weekly routine you have to stick to it or people will lose interest, so me bad. I’ll be running an interview with Werner Herzog on Thursday from my Brooklyn abode.

King Kong had a good weekend ($50.1 million) and has pulled down an estimated $66.2 million since it opened on 12.14. It’s had a successful start and will continue to be successful, etc. Why, then, do audience pulse rates so far seem so profoundly tepid? Why are readers saying over and over again, “I expected huge lines but we got right in wihout a wait,” etc.? It’s Christmas and King Kong is showing and people are going…fine. But if you’re in high school and it’s lunch time and you go to the cafeteria and there are three meals on the menu — meat loaf, coq au vin and hot dogs — and everyone orders the meat loaf, does that mean students are doing cartwheels in their hearts about how the meat loaf tastes? We’re talking King Meat Loaf here. Dull appetizers and overcooked vegetables, but the main order covered in hot gravy and fun to eat, mmmm-good!…but all you can do is shrug when your friends ask how it was.

I know we’re all taking off for the holidays, but the failure of major entertainment reporters to step up and face the reality of the Great Middle-American Ho-Humming of King Kong is amazing. This is a hugely surprising story and….zzzzz. Joseph Jones , a reader, says he “saw King Kong last night at an AMC multiplex here in Tampa. We arrived an hour prior to the show, expecting a line (I remember arriving an hour before a showing of Jurassic Park back in 1993 — and still ending up near the back of the line and in dreadful off-to-the-side seats) but we were the first ones there. We were let into the theater a half-hour before the show, and, by this time, there were maybe 10 people. By the time the show started, there were plenty of empty seats…still. I can’t say I share your enthusiasm for the film — I found that first hour pretty much intolerable, the second hour ok, and the third hour fantastic. Yet, by that time, I was grateful for this bombastic flick to finally end. Audience reaction seemed good but not great. I overheard the group behind me saying that they’d enjoyed other films this year more (Batman Begins was mentioned as a preferred film). My companion commented that while there was some truly amazing stuff in the film, there was also a lot of bad stuff in the film. I imagine word-of-mouth is going to be mixed.”

King Kong is weaker than expected because the girls aren’t into him, or so goes the theory. “Judging by the women I’ve spoken with, there’s a definite non-interest in Kong,” says reader Matthew Meyerotto. “The movie has no sex symbols. Adrian Brody is too obscure and Jack Black is too chubby. Even if Kong is a love story at its core, the average female movie going audience is too shallow to be brought into the theater without a pretty face.”

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is looking at a projected $34.7 million this weekend, or a 47% drop from the opening round. Syriana is looking at a 55% drop….dead. The Family Stone is projecting a $10 million weekend at $4 thou- sand a print…not launching. But Brokeback Mountain, now in 69 theatres, will pull down about $2.3 million this weekend or $33,000 per print…solid healthy numbers. I know this sounds a bit confusing, but this is what the hard-nosed guys are saying.

The Producers will earn a projected $159,000 at six theatres this weekend, or $26,000 a print. Trackers are saying this is D.O.A. business…finito. A guy keeping tabs on the numbers at New York’s Ziegfeld theatre told a friend he knew The Producers was dead after Friday’s first matinee. Too many bad reviews, too cornball, no under-25 attendance to speak of and Susan Stroman can’t direct with any pizazz or sense of style…down for the count and off to DVD.

A Birmingham guy named Chance Shirley (great name!)
says he and the missus “went down to the local multiplex last night for a 7:40 Family Stone screening. After hearing your concerns that Fox had dropped the ball marketing-wise, I was surprised that we had trouble finding a seat — the place was packed. It wasn’t long before a theater manager stepped in to let us know Stone would be playing on an additional screen. Both screening rooms were pretty full after all was said and done, and the film seemed to go over well with the audience. We don’t live in the most metropolitan of areas — I’d imagine the movie will play even better in the bigger cities. Thanks for the heads-up — my wife and I both enjoyed it.”

King Kong finally surged and took in $14.2 million yesterday (Friday, 12.15) following Thursday’s paltry $6.4 million and Wednesday’s disappointing $9.8 million. It’ll probably tally $46 to $47 million for the three-day weekend and about $62 million for the first five days. Figure a domestic total of $250 or $275 million after all is said and done…which is less than what Universal was hoping for. Kong will turn a handy profit down the road, but there’s a definite shortfall thing happening here and it’s hard to figure why. What happened to the monster revenues that were expected from the get-go?

“The trouble [with King Kong] is that Jackson, an exuberant director, fresh from his triumph with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, likes to shoot up a storm, and here his exuberance spills over into senselessness,” writes David Denby in his New Yorker review. The Depression background, just a few shots in the original [Kong], is stretched out here with a montage of shantytowns and strikes; the black “natives” in Skull Island — filthy, grotesque and vicious — seem like escapees from a sideshow. In the original, Kong defends his blonde against dinosaurs for just a couple of scenes, but here the fights go on forever. Repeating what Spielberg has already accomplished in the Jurassic Park series, Jackson has fallen into a trap. Spectacle must be more and more astonishing or it creates as much as boredom as wonder, yet it’s not easy, as filmmakers are finding out, to top what others have delivered and stay within a disciplined narrative.”

When I told my 16 year-old son a couple of hours ago that King Kong earned $9.7 million on its opening day (i.e., Wednesday, 12.13), he said, “Really? That sucks!” And the Drudge Report is using the headline “Kong bomb.” It’s not as bad as all that, although it’s certainly disappointing. The $9.7 million Wednesday opening for the most ballyhooed heavyweight spectacle movie of the year (as well as one with a built-in Peter Jackson fan base) is only the 21st highest all-time Wednesday opening. Universal was looking for Kong to earn $80 or $90 million for five days, and now the opening five-day projection is more in the realm of $55 to $65 million. (I’ve been hearing lower and higher projections.) Disney’s The Chronicles of Narnia made $65 million last weekend alone, but that film had all those church groups behind it and Kong, I hear, is having trouble attracting women. The Universal view is that (a) “the story won’t be told until after next Sunday…during Xmas week when a Wednesday can be like a Saturday” and (b) “to us it doesn’t portend anything, good or bad.”

It’s 11:48 am and a press release just came into my inbox: “The National Lampoon is excited to announce its collaboration with Half Shell Entertainment Films to create new feature films based on archived material from the revered and classic National Lampoon magazine.” This is basically hooey and nothing new because those great old Lampoon short stories by Chris Miller and Doug Kenney will only be weakened or bloated up if they’re adapted for a feature film. Half Shell won’t do this, but they should make a short film based on Kenney’s “First Blow Job,” which ran in ’73. It’s still hilarious, and here it is.

Ron Howard gets a little bit better with every movie he makes, but this trailer for The DaVinci Code (Columbia, 5.19.06) makes it look like he’s back-slided. It makes a convincing case that the film will be a conventional bullshit potboiler. All it tells me is that (a) Tom Hanks is a year away from being 50 and he looks too old to be paired with the 27 year-old Audrey Tatou, (b) the obsession that Christians have with the celibate legend of Yeshua of Nazareth is totally bumpkin and deranged, (and (c) the Americans have invaded Paris and made that magical city seem just a little less attractive. Thanks, guys.