No question about it — Ratatouille is going be the #1 film this coming weekend. It’s tracking at 82, 36 and 13, which is very high for a family film. Tracking never picks up on the full b.o. gobsmack of animated fare.
Live Free or Die Hard (20th Century Fox, opening tomorrow) will perform impressively this weekend, but I’m betting that opening day will be the biggest of the five. The word-of-mouth will half-help and half-hurt, and so the Sunday-night total will be strong but short of historic. 89, 40 and 16 means $25 to $30 million for the weekend, maybe $40 million for the five days.
Sicko did terrific business in Manhattan last weekend, but it’s tracking at 47, 20 and 4. Not bad but not great. “People don’t want to see a movie about health care,” blah, blah…but what people don’t seem to understand is that Sicko makes you melt in the final act. I’ve never once teared up in my life over the idea of regular people receiving lousy health care, but Sicko changed all that.
A marketing guy contends that “the real problem with Sicko‘s awareness and interest levels is that Harvey Weinstein “does band-aid spending” on ads and TV buys, and that “money flows through his hands like concrete.”
You Kill Me, expanding this weekend, could use a shot of some kind — 22, 21 and zero.
Evening (Focus Features, opening Friday), a relatiojnship drama aimed at older couples and mature women, doesn’t have much of a pulse…27, 22 and 2.
Transformers is going to be (big surprise) huge — 91, 42 and 13. The head-scratcher is the length — two hours and 20-something minutes for a picture that has to appeal to kids and young teens? The reason for this is that no one tells Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg anything — they’re surrounded by flunkies, cocooned in their own realm.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix is racking up monster numbers even though it doesn’t open until 7.11 — 91, 50 and 15.
License to Wed (Warner Bros., 73), the Robin Williams comedy that preemed last night at the Arclight, is looking weak — 68, 24 and 2. And Captivity, the latest torture porn entry, is at 25, 21 and 1.