A Fandango survey of 2800 Sex and the City ticket-buyers reports that (a) 94% are women, (b) 67% plan to see it with a group of women; (c) 16% of the female respondents said they are going with a single woman friend; and (d) 6 % said they were going with a man. (I feel sorry for those guys.) It’s expected to do slightly better on its first weekend than The Devil Wears Prada, which did $27.5 million in its opening frame and took in $124.7 by the end of the domestic run. Sex is expected to earn more than $30 million by Sunday night, and possibly exceed $35 million.
I’ll be seeing it for the first time at a noon show in Paris tomorrow, and will file sometime tomorrow afternoon.
No screening invites since the good people at Warner Bros., who apparently ran screenings for this New Line/HBO co-production, have kept me on their don’t-invite-him for several months because, as I explained a while back, I had the temerity to write this ten-month-old piece about an abrasive ad/trailer for No Reservations. Former WB marketing chief Dawn Taubin (a.k.a., “the village idiot”) apparently became offended. The ban officially kicked in three months later (it takes Warner Bros. distribution execs a long while to get around to making decisions), and that was that.
I wouldn’t mind as Warner Bros., like other studios, is basically out of the game of making movies for hip or even halfway-hip adults. It has CG’ed and downmarketed itself into the cultural pig trough. Hey, Jeff Robinov, I have an idea — how about about making Grand Theft Auto 4: The Movie? You could make some money with that and honor the Warner Bros. legacy (which is being honored by You Must Remember This, a Richard Schickel documentary about the good old tyrannical Jack L. Warner days) at the same time.
The ’08 exceptions to not being in the WB groove will be missing out on press screenings of (a) The Dark Knight and (b) Clint Eastwood‘s Gran Torino. And I regret, of course, that the WB advertising that I used to get during Oscar season is now history.