This week:
The Social Network has more friends than Life As We Know It; Paramount Pictures acquires Young Adult; Hanks and Depp eye Sleeping Dogs, Robert Downey Jr is the new Steve McQueen in Yucatan; we get a first look at Nic Cage and Nic Kidman in Trespass; there are two Iceman movies on the way and Val Kilmer isn’t in either one; life is a Battleground for ABC and get ready for some Awkward Family Photos.
Box Office
It was a close race for pole position this weekend at the box office, with Life As We Know It and last week’s number one film The Social Network both fighting it out for the number one spot. David Fincher’s Facebook movie took the top spot after collecting another $15.9 million. The film has now banked a total of $46 million.
Katherine Heigl’s Life As We Know It had to settle for second place after grossing just under $15 million. It’s not a terrible start, but Heigel’s films seem to be grossing less and less.
Secretariat (read our review) won’t be going the distance as it debuted at number three with a weekend take of $12.6 million. The Disney release was seen as the main contender for box office champion this weekend, but its opening was much softer than expected.
Wes Craven’s horror flick My Soul To Take was fourth with an estimated $6.9 million. Expect it to drop hard next weekend like most horror films – but it may have a spike in a week or two when Halloween rolls around.
Legend of the Guardians dropped to fifth place on its third week. The animated owl movie brought in another $7 million giving it a $39 million total.
Ben Affleck’s The Town scored another $6 million worth of green. The Boston based bank robbery thriller has now grabbed over $73 million. At this stage it looks unlikely that it’ll hit $100 million – but if it gets an Oscar nod or two the grosses could swell.
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps brought in a smidgen under $5 million. The films total now stands at $43 million, which is pretty much the original Wall Street‘s lifetime gross – unadjusted from 1987.
Easy A inched closer to $50 million after bringing in another $4.2 million. Case 39 was down almost 60% in grosses. The thriller scored another $2.6 million for a $9.6 million total gross, while You Again upped its cume to over $20 million after grossing another $2.5 million.
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Movie News
1. Paramount Pictures has picked up worldwide distribution rights for the latest Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody team-up Young Adult. Charlize Theron stars in the comedy which starts shooting later this month in New York.
Expect witty comments and pithy one-liners galore as the duo try to replicate the success of Juno which racked up $227 million at the worldwide box office.
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2. Johnny Depp and Tom Hanks are currently in the frame to star in Kathryn Bigelow’s first film since The Hurt Locker – the South American drug tale Sleeping Dogs.
Hanks’ involvement seems assured but the always in demand Depp has several projects lined up for the new year. The star is set to reunite with director Tim Burton (yawn) for Dark Shadows and join forces with Salma Hayek in director Emir Kusturica’s Pancho Villa.
Decisions eh?
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3. In June we told you that Robert Downey Jr was set to bring Steve McQueen’s passion project Yucatan to the big screen, well the Iron Man star is a step closer to realizing McQueen’s dream as he has now hired Anthony Peckham to write the script.
The heist tale is based on a story created by McQueen, who drew up 1500 pages of notes and storyboards filling 15 notebooks!
Peckham is an in demand writer who has also been recently hired to write a new draft of the latest Jack Ryan adventure.
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4. During the summer we told you that Nicolas Cage had decided to drop out of Joel Schumacher’s Trespass and go on vacation. The star later returned to the project after mulling over a role change in the thriller about a couple who are terrorized by a group of robbers. Cage originally signed on to play the husband, but later pondered a switch to the lead robber. The picture below shows that when he returned to the film, he also returned to his original role.
Nicole Kidman co-stars in Trespass.
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5. We recently told you that Mickey Rourke would star in The Ice Man, a film based on Richard Kuklinski (known as… “The Ice Man”), a hitman who has claimed to have murdered 250 people from 1948-1986. Well, it now looks like there is another Ice Man biopic fighting for your attention.
Director Ariel Vromen has been working on his own Kuklinski project called The Iceman (note the slightly different title) which is set to star James Franco, Michael Shannon and Benicio Del Toro.
It’ll be interesting to see which makes it to the screens first. I’d bet on Vromen’s film as Rourke has a slew of projects on his “to do” list and The Iceman seems slightly further along the development conveyor belt.
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6. Imagine the predicament: you develop a television series with an up and coming writer/director who signs on to direct a huge superhero franchise before your series airs. Said series premieres and the ratings aren’t great, so the show is canceled. How do you now keep this writer/director happy so that your working relationship isn’t ruined?
This is the problem that faced Fox after it canceled new Spider-Man director Marc Webb’s Lone Star. Well, the network has now picked up the comedy Battleground, which Webb is set to supervise and produce.
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7. The latest online phenomenon to make it to screens is Awkward Family Photos (check out the site here). Sony Pictures TV will produce the project for ABC.
The original site (and book) shows… er… awkward family photographs. It’ll be interesting to see how this idea translates into a weekly narrative.
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In the future – get ready for Screen Rant: The Movie. An epic tale of intrigue, which follows the adventures of a group of online film writers as they try to attain certain highly guarded secrets from Hollywood.
Think Ocean’s Eleven meets All The Presidents Men.
That’s it for now. See you at the movies.
