Jake Gittes

First started checking out the weekend gross numbers at ComingSoon sometime in early 2005 (a month or two before ROTS opened). I was 11 back then. Around the same time I came across the box-office section at IMDb.I discovered BOM in late June 2006 and the combination of getting to know so much about so many movies' box office and DMC opening and smashing all opening records hooked me completely at that moment. Pretty soon there was no way back.

It would have been, at the very least, a 35/110 movie if it had opened in 2900-3100 theaters... might have even got into Safe House / American Gangster territory.

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Argo has the Skyfall weekend and the pre-Thanksgiving weekend as its 5th and 6th weekends, whereas The Town had three weeks of total October desolation to itself after its fourth weekend. I believe Argo will be lucky to have sub-30% drops in the next two weekends (which would be great because most holdovers will fall much harder), and won't reach $100m until Thanksgiving weekend. Then there's the black Friday weekend, meaning a 40% drop at the very least for pretty much any movie. The way I see it, $100m is locked for Argo, $110m is likely, and there's an outside chance at $120m.And I have no idea where you pulled that $40m OW in 3700 theaters from. Regardless of PTA, Flight's OW is still $24m, and any movie that wants to make $100m off a $24m OW has to work long and hard to do it. There's still no guarantee Paramount will expand it enough to substantially affect its legs. I would agree about $100m being locked if Flight made $24m in 800 theaters a la Borat, but it's far from the same situation.

I really wouldn't throw those words together with those numbers around if I were you. Flight isn't locked for anything more than $75m right now and Argo has ways to go before reaching even $100m yet. We'll see what Skyfall and the pre-Thanksgiving weekend have to say about both of them.

Even if it doesn't expand further and follows, say, American Gangster's multiplier, it'll still do $70m at the very least.

What I got out of that theater count was that Paramount wasn't sure if there'd be a demand. To put it more bluntly, I thought they were ready to dump it - just like WB dumped Cloud Atlas. I highly doubt Flight's PTA would have been worse in 2500 theaters, so why didn't Paramount go for that?

Cloud Atlas will start getting "wide pre-release showings" starting this Friday (not sure exactly how wide, but I looked up a couple of big theaters in my city and they are essentially treating it like any other opener with a lot of showings) and then expand in 1400 theaters on Nov 8. I'm curious exactly how much money it's gonna rack up in almost 2 weeks.

I almost can't believe how much I think I'd enjoy Adele winning this.

Having seen Skyfall, I think it has a better chance of pulling a Bourne Ultimatum than a MI4 at the Oscars. I can easily see it scoring nominations for sound and sound editing, it definitely shouldn't be counted out of the cinematography contention, and if the music branch is able to get over Adele using about four seconds of pre-existing music in her song, that nomination should practically be a lock. Unlike TBU, however, it's not very likely to win anything, but who knows.

There's no way Phoenix doesn't get a nomination.

Cannes and Venice are high brow. The Academy is where Denzel Washington asks his wife to vote because he couldn't care less.Sure, I have no doubt a good part of the voters recognize Haneke's name and some recognize Riva's, but that doesn't mean they are all going to suddenly get filled with endless appreciation of her career and give her an Oscar when they didn't bother giving one to much more recognizable American and international actors (whom I've listed previously) and when they've been awarding Best Actress to hot up-and-comers with showy roles like Lawrence's since the dawn of time.

When it took Plummer his second nomination to win, and when the voters never had it in mind to reward Ruby Dee, Hal Holbrook and Max von Sydow with anything more than a nomination in recent years, they aren't going to reward a foreign actress a lot of them haven't heard about before. They aren't all hardcore cinephiles, you know. And even if they did happen to see Hiroshima Mon Amour at some point, I'm pretty sure they had other things to do rather than track the subsequent career of the lead actress.

And how many people among voters will care about her career to such an extent? Nothing against her, but she's not exactly Christopher Plummer.

The thing bothering me about the Chastain bandwagon is we don't even know how meaty her role is. And the full trailer doesn't help. I mean, watch it - Chastain doesn't even say a single word during the entire thing. And it's not like she's busy being emotional, either. Literally all she does is walk around, stand around and stare around. Then she puts her hands on her face and another character calls her confident. Yeah, that's an Oscar-winning performance right there.Don't get me wrong, I don't want to jump to conclusions, I'm not one to judge something based on a 2-minute snippet and I like Chastain a lot, but surely if there was anything award-worthy about her work in ZDT, anything at all, Sony would have included at least a little bit of it in the trailer? But no, now she gets moved in the lead actress field and all of a sudden she's major competition to the frontrunner just because what? She's respected and had a good previous year? To me, it's ridiculous. And even if her acting is great, but too subtle and with no show-stopping moments (like Jeremy Renner in THL), she won't win either because performances like that almost never win.

The Help, Dolphin Tale and Safe House rose to #1 in their second weekends, but no movie waited until in its third.

Argo is locked for $85m, almost guaranteed to reach $90m and pretty likely to go over $100m if the Oscar expansion happens. There's also a chance if it doesn't.We'll see how Flight and Skyfall affect it. Also, WB sure needs to stop ridding it of so many theaters in a single weekend.

Leave it to fish to find a way to bash a Lord of the Rings actor in a conversation centering on Tyler Perry.It's getting more and more ridiculous

if only

Tangled was an exception as far as non-sequels go. I see no reason why Ralph would open over $7-8m. The retro videogame thing isn't as much of a hook, and Tangled was definitely more widely appealing.

That's... not much

I think it's going to be the seven in Dexter's post plus Moonrise Kingdom.BTW, Hyde Park got received pretty coldly in Toronto so it's not in contention here.

Come on Atlas, at least do 10/30 for chrissake.

It's not even about competition, it's about being frontloaded. People flock to see the movie in the first week, and by the end of the second week, it should take something special for them not to abandon it completely. Like Avatar's 3D or Inception's ending. I don't see Skyfall having something like that, and simply being a better-than-average Bond movie won't be enough.

Russia doesn't put much stock in quality. Legs are similarly non-existent here for pretty much all live-action blockbusters nowadays. Avatar and Inception are the only ones I can remember, right off the bat, that had any.