BoxOfficeFangrl

Rollin makes me think of The Fast and the Furious so Limp Bizkit wasn't totally useless...

Never saw it, the reviews were rather meh, the advertising/hype was minimal and another straight R&J remake just seemed unnecessary. She was also in Ender's Game, though that's not quite on her shoulders in the same way. I do hope the commercial/critical success of True Grit won't prove to be a fluke for her.

For real, how is that possible? I guess it's in twelve theaters and some (most) of them were empty all day? That's a Zyzzyx Road kind of number.

I figured the Games couldn't go on to their conclusion because otherwise all the new supporting characters would die, or there would be multiple winners again, and that had been done the year before. And the series only has three books total, so there's not going to be the same level of story arc repetition that something like Harry Potter has. Anyway, I thought they might escape somehow, so it was either finding a secret passage out (unlikely, with the cameras everywhere) or blowing up the arena and the latter is a lot more dramatic.

Maybe traveling? Some people probably begin the trek home from Thanksgiving on Saturday.

ABC News ‏@ABC 2m .@ABC News confirms "Fast and Furious" star Paul Walker has died at the age of 40 Hollywood Reporter ‏@THR 1m Paul Walker Dies in Car Accident at Age 40 http://j.mp/18uTKYF

They're both hot, just different types of good looking. But variety is the spice of life... Amazing for Catching Fire, if it hits $300 million in 10 days that will be spectacular, even if not, $400m is a lock.

Longbottom, Neville Longbottom Matthew Lewis: I do think it will be someone around that age (b. 1989), maybe a few years older but not much more, when they get around to replacing Craig.

Can't say I'm a fan, even though there were clues left for both pairings all along, I was hoping they were just red herrings. Ron and Hermione having their first kiss when they did made zero sense. Harry only liking Ginny once he saw what a hot kisser she was with other guys, real great message there. I felt like Harry should have been put with a girl who brought out interesting aspects of his character rather than the one who would make him an "official" part of the Weasley family. In real life, sure, people love who they love, but in a fictional story there aren't those same constraints and you can do something more dynamic and meaningful.

Not feeling it, they should have done a Quidditch movie...

That's true but that makes it a kids' book, which is fine, but when people try to argue that Potter is so YA and dark and edgy and deep, I think, well, then, the plots and twists and the message have to hold up to better scrutiny than, "But it works for kids!" Order of the Phoenix is my favorite Potter book because it was the series moving into areas the little kid fans were just flat-out too young to understand, it showed the series really growing up and I felt HBP in a lot of ways was a retreat from that, which I found unfortunate. Calling it now, Matthew Lewis (Neville) is going to be the next James Bond after Daniel Craig.

Yeah, what were the odds that he was really going to be a bad guy after all? Also, I guessed the twist for the real reason he and James hated each other so much after Sorcerer's Stone, Azkaban sealed it for me. It was so obvious what the death was going to be in Book Six, because that type of character always dies at that point in a story, but you also knew that Snape was still going to turn out to be a "good" guy. Did people really think Book Seven was going to be all about how Snape was really evil the whole time and pulled the wool over Dumbledore's eyes? So the last two books were kind of lacking suspense for me on that front. I preferred the idea of Ginny really moving on to the whole "she just said she moved on but was really holding out for him to notice her once she got hot" angle. The Ginny build-up started in OotP when she started talking around him and was the secret Quidditch star and she caught the Snitch under Cho's nose and Ron was trying to push them together at the end when he heard she was dating Dean. What Ron wants, Ron gets, because what is Harry Potter all about but making the Weasleys the heart of everything? I think maybe the triangle in The Hunger Games is so dry because Katniss isn't the most sentimental character and they're all struggling in a dystopian universe.

But Ron and Hermione bickered all the time, that was supposed to be the tip-off that they were truly meant to be! I can't say Rowling didn't leave clues about where the ships were headed from the start, but for me, the main pairings are the least interesting option done in the least interesting way. When there's the attitude that they're too young, the romance has to be "lighthearted" and not "too gritty", well, okay, but you've kind of shaped the audience's thinking to discount romance as being really important to the story. So when that card is pulled with Snape in the end, and you want to say, this is the reason for everything he did, you had fans who were mad and couldn't deal with a Potter book using that angle, because they were trained to think that HP wasn't that kind of story. So I kind of wish Rowling had gone for it a bit more with the romance, not been scared to make it a little less innocent. I mean, I don't even like Ron and Hermione together, but when they were camping for months and had no adult supervision, they never got around to kissing for all that time because...? IRL, come on, Harry would've walked in on them about to screw at least once.

That's another issue, too, that the characters' flaws were all kind of smoothed out too much, but that was with several characters besides Harry, like Hermione and Snape. But I do think the whole "Dumbledore explains it all, or Hermione is there to look it up" aspect of the books is a huge issue with adapting the films, less so when he's a little kid but more in the later books when Harry is supposed to be the man. In movies especially audiences respond more to characters who discover/do things themselves. Also the romance, the way it's done in Potter just seems...wrong to me, where it's only natural the audience is more invested in his friends getting together, because you know them a lot better, collectively, than Harry and who he ends up with. It would be like in Star Wars, if Luke got with Hannah Solo or something. Nice enough, I guess, but a bit "who cares" compared to Han and Leia. Speaking of the Imperial March, Hedwig's Theme is just a rearranged version of it, right?

That's the basic problem of condensing the movies down to being all about Harry. I don't fault the movies for not all being 4-5 hours long but Rowling for creating a world around such an ultimately blah protagonist who's led around by the nose and constantly saved by smarter/more dynamic characters. It would be different if he weren't the freaking title character for every single book. Maybe that won't be a problem with the Fantastic Beasts movie, which BTW seems like a big underwhelmer waiting to happen. They really should've done a Quidditch movie.

The night game on Thanksgiving only goes back to 2006 and stores have only in the past few years started holding Black Friday sales on Thursday night, so you have men and women who might have gone to the movies in the evening, watching football or shopping instead. It definitely has an impact on the box office. If you look back at 2001 or so, you'll see movies actually increasing on Thanksgiving Day, which pretty much never happens now.

Has someone saved all the different thread titles since Friday?

People suspect the studio of exaggerating Catching Fire's estimates, i.e. fudging them, to get all the good headlines about its box office performance, and that the actuals won't be as strong. Hence, the photos of fudge.

Great timing there, Ichabod. Not only violating the Bro Code, but telling him the day after she'd broken off the engagement and asking for his blessing. I mean, violence is not the answer, but how did he think the guy was going to react? Rich society woman, Quaker, witch...can the writers settle on a backstory for Katrina and stick to it?

But it's not an isolated thing for there to be major "surprise" in box office circles, that a movie with a cast that isn't primarily white manages to open strongly. Especially when it's not a Tyler Perry movie. It's always something that regulars on a box office board have little awareness of, because it's just not on their radar, so they ignore all the other signs, outside of tracking, of how big it could be. There's also the annual "OMG, women go to movies!" "surprise" that's just as annoying, as if women aren't half the population and every year doesn't have movies headlined by female stars that make a nice amount of money. Funny how Hollywood and box office watchers get amnesia that way. It makes you wonder just who is being tracked in the tracking and why it misses so badly at times.

Interesting article on the box-office reporting this year of Best Man Holiday and other movies with primarily black casts:

Ten years ago—time to sell the story to a new generation!

Yeah the ads just had Hugh yelling, "Let's make some money!" and made the jokes that it was just a cash grab job for Jackman so easy. I heard pretty good things from everyone who actually saw it. The ads/trailers for Ender's Game made it seem like it was all about Harrison Ford being gruff and some kid looking really intense, and it was in space, I guess. And it wasn't a game! Unless it's some weird esoteric awards bait thing, a studio should be able to sell the public on a basic story outline in 5-6 sentences max. The movie as a whole can be a lot more complex than that but you have to get people into theaters in the first place.

I am espoused to another! I love Ichabod's reactions to modern day things like bottled water and XXX sites.

It does seem kind of weird. THG isn't all tra la la like Potter or a swashbuckling adventure with comic overtones that makes it a theme park-friendly franchise. But I guess this means Collins wrote the story she wanted to, instead of leaving stuff out of canon because she was thinking of all the Lego sales and theme park admissions she might lose if the books included elements that upset too many parents or readers in more conservative countries. But a movie studio being a movie studio, they are going to try to squeeze all the money they can out of a property, even if it skirts the line of good taste or sense.