This weekend, the third installment in the Paranormal Activity franchise — a supernatural sensation since Oren Peli’s original film debuted in 2009 — rocked the box office, taking in $54 million for its opening weekend. The film also holds rank as the highest grossing movie for any October opening in history. While Paranormal Activity’s victory can be largely attributed to its successful grassroots marketing campaign and Halloween slot (it replaced popular spooky long-runner Saw), it’s still quite the feat for a part three film. Most threequels fizzle out by the third go-round, leaving their characters to dully ride the coattails of previous successes — but clearly that isn’t always the case. And with news about Sherlock Holmes securing a writer for its third installment, perhaps the action-mystery movie can follow suit. After the break, we took a look at several trilogies that buck the trend of bad things coming in threes — some third features even managing to outdo the films that started their respective series.
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ArtsBeat has tipped us off to the fact that thanks to The Blind Side and The Proposal, which grossed more than $500 million last year — and in spite of the mullet-wig disaster that was All About Steve — Sandra Bullock has been named the top box-office draw of 2009 by movie theater executives. To put this in perspective, the illustrious Meryl Streep made this year’s list at number 7, and the last woman to win top honors was Julia Roberts back in 1999, the year of Runaway Bride and Notting Hill.
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Today at Flavorpill, we considered skinny dipping. We cheered for Internet Explorer’s death. We took very bad advice from Brad Pitt and took good look at Scarlet Johansson as the black widow. We could have sworn we saw a transformer outside the office window. We laughed at a band who thinks Pharrell stole their generic beat. We were oddly amused that organic arctic goo exists. And finally, we rekindled our love for Bill Cosby.
The movie critics are calling it the “worst film of the decade, yet simultaneously, the greatest allegory for the automobile industry.” Transformers 2, has tied Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs for the #1 spot making $42.5M over the holiday weekend. (This secures The Hangover as the only movie this year to hold the numero uno spot for two consecutive weekends.) Transformer 2‘s inability to come out on top comes as no surprise, since both sequels easily divide the ”me like big 3-D creatures break stuff” audience. Read More »
Obviously good press makes all the difference, as last weekend’s top two films (The Hangover and UP) hung onto their top spots with little to no competition from newcomers The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 and the dismally-performing Eddie Murphy kid’s flick Imagine That (why, Eddie?). Read More »
After reading about the latest Clive Owen dud, we wondered what happened to the hunky, talented Brit — our favorite thing about Closer. As this post on EW.com points out, The International had everything in place for box office magic: A thriller about an evil finance corporation that “couldn’t be more topical if it included a subplot about octuplets and a pot-smoking Olympic swimmer,” direction from Run Lola Run‘s Tom Tykwer, and, well, its leading man.
Yet, first week numbers earned it a number seven position. Translation: it fared even worse than Confessions of a Shopaholic. After the jump, we explore why moviegoers would rather spend their cash on flicks about chubby mall cops than evil financial institutions; here’s hoping for a Clive Owen shared comeback with Julia Roberts.
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