Bob Strauss: Hey, you missed a few
In his enthusiasm about MI: III's 50% second weekend boxoffice drop (not that bad, actually, for a big, front-loaded tentpole entry; but worse, of course, for one that didn't do superwell on its first weekend), my colleague David failed to note other aspects of the across-the-board calamity that was the second weekend of the 2006 summer movie season.
He mentioned Poseidon's failure to launch. But beside not being able to count on Tom Cruise and sinking ships to generate mindless entertainment dollars anymore, there's more for Hollywood to worry about. Lindsay Lohan also lost the tween girl audience with her idiotic Just My Luck, which only made some $5 million and change, and Disney's long lobotomized sports underdog formula got drop-kicked as Goal didn't even open in the top 10 grossers chart.
How bad is it? The film with the best audience holdover for the past two weeks is the wretched Robin Williams family "comedy" RV. Whatever their flaws, Tom Cruise and Lindsay Lohan are great performers and Poseidon and MI: III boast terrific production values. But a big portion of the audience obvioulsy prefers their junk abject, not fortified with anything the least bit worthwhile.
None of this makes me sad. I enjoy watching Cruise and Lohan in movies, enjoy a little less laughing at their offscreen antics, and really don't take any pleasure in the malicious media lynchings their sudden boxoffice weaknesses have triggered. The idea that people won't go to movies because their stars have been overexposed elsewhere also seems just plain dodo-brained; how hard can it be, after watching filmed entertainment your whole life, to look at movies as the make-believe art that they are and not be influenced, while watching one for an hour or two, by the TomKat or LiLo real life soap operas?
Overall, though, if the failure of mediocre-to-bad movies like MI, Poseidon and Luck means studios will have to try harder to make better summer fare, then I'm all for fewer ticket sales.
I just worry that they'll take the wrong signal from RV's relative durability and make even dumber movies, then market them as family films - "family" being code for nothing your 5-year-old won't get.
The next two weekends ought to tell if audiences can still appreciate quality entertainment. I haven't seen The Da Vinci Code yet, but Over the Hedge is the cleverest animated feature DreamWorks has dropped in a couple of years. And for all you true Marvel Comics fans out there, your dream film arrives for the holiday. If you let the fact that its director has been linked to Lohan-involved bar fights keep you away, you've probably forgotten how to enjoy movies anyway.
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