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Cavalier
Joined: 02 Oct 2005
Posts: 23
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 Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2005 7:02 am Post subject: Serenity Box Office -- The Numbers Are In |
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Hi all,
The weekend box office numbers have just been announced and, unfortunately, it's not the best news for Serenity. But I'll let the numbers speak for themselves:
No. 1 - Flightplan; weekend gross: $15M; # of screens: 3424; Gross to date: $46.1M
No. 2 - Serenity; weekend gross: $10.1M; # of screens: 2188; Gross to date: $10.1M
No. 3 - Corpse Bride; weekend gross: $9.7M; # of screens: 3204; Gross to date: $32.9M
No. 4 - A History of Violence; weekend gross: $8.2M; # of screens: 1340; Gross to date: $9M
No. 5 - Into The Blue; weekend gross: $7M; # of screens: 2789; Gross to date: $7M |
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marksman
Joined: 22 Sep 2005
Posts: 7
Location: Los Angeles
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| Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2005 8:48 am Post subject: Re: Serenity Box Office -- The Numbers Are In |
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| Cavalier wrote: | Hi all,
The weekend box office numbers have just been announced and, unfortunately, it's not the best news for Serenity. But I'll let the numbers speak for themselves... |
Thanks for the box office stats! What needs to be looked at now, though, is the percentage drop in attendance to "Serenity" the second weekend. That is usually one of the best indicators of how well a movie is going to perform financially, given it is a much better reflection of "word of mouth" than studio marketing. For "Serenity," My guess is anything less than a 25% drop in attendance would be quite healthy for the movie. |
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Cynewulf the Saxon
Joined: 28 Jun 2004
Posts: 1389
Location: Vallejo, CA
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| Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:10 am Post subject: |
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I'm an optimist. I think there may be an increase next weekend.
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Duncan
Joined: 26 Apr 2004
Posts: 586
Location: Sherman Oaks, CA
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| Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:37 am Post subject: |
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There'll only be an increase if we keep spreading the word.
Don't slacken now! |
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Cynewulf the Saxon
Joined: 28 Jun 2004
Posts: 1389
Location: Vallejo, CA
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| Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:39 am Post subject: |
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Now it's easier.
"Have you seen Serenity yet? Awesome movie. You'll want to see this one on the big screen. It's better than that last three Star Wars."
We don't have to worry about converting anyone now. We just get them to see a movie.
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Wyrd oft nereth unfaegne eorl, thonne his ellen deah. |
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Cavalier
Joined: 02 Oct 2005
Posts: 23
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| Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:42 am Post subject: |
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I absolutely agree. Here's something I posted on the subject on the Spoilers forum (properly scrubbed, of course):
| Quote: | If we want more of the FireFly/Serenity franchise, we've *got* to keep going to the movie and getting those we know to go. Without a blockbuster opening the only hope for more of the world we love is if Serenity is a steady, long-term performer. It's worked for a lot of indie films. Hollywood loves big openers, but as the industry has seen opening numbers drop steadily across the board, they've come to value slow and steady performers as well (for example, March of The Penguins.)
I live in LA-LA Land and have friends in "The Business". And I'm telling you, now is not the time to abandon the franchise. There's still a good chance to see Serenity fly again if we can keep delivering $10M, or at least $5M to $7M weekends for weeks to come.
I'm doing my part -- I'm getting a bunch of friends in Germany hooked on FireFly so they'll be pumped to go see the Nov. 24th opening there.
What are you doing? |
I get access to the weekend U.S. box office numbers around 6am Monday morning. I'll commit to keep posting those numbers each Monday here, as long as you folks want to see them. |
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Duncan
Joined: 26 Apr 2004
Posts: 586
Location: Sherman Oaks, CA
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| Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:46 am Post subject: |
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| Cynewulf the Saxon wrote: | Now it's easier.
"Have you seen Serenity yet? Awesome movie. You'll want to see this one on the big screen. It's better than that last three Star Wars."
We don't have to worry about converting anyone now. We just get them to see a movie. |
Well, since I've been guilty of posting reviews for "Sith" on this website, I must post this favorable review of "Serenity" from the New York Times.
Apologies if it's already been posted - there are so many postings lately, I don't have time to go through them all!
September 30, 2005
Scruffy Space Cowboys Fighting Their Failings
By MANOHLA DARGIS
It probably isn't fair to Joss Whedon's "Serenity" to say that this unassuming science-fiction adventure is superior in almost every respect to George Lucas's aggressively more ambitious "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith." But who cares about fair when there is fun to be had? Scene for scene, "Serenity" is more engaging and certainly better written and acted than any of Mr. Lucas's recent screen entertainments. Mr. Whedon isn't aiming to conquer the pop-culture universe with a branded mythology; he just wants us to hitch a ride to a galaxy far, far away and have a good time. The journey is the message, not him.
As the creator of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," writing the original movie and producing the television series, Mr. Whedon has enjoyed an exalted position in the pop stratosphere. Over the years he has lent his talent, sometimes without credit, to screenplays for "Toy Story," "Speed" and the last and least successful "Alien" film, "Alien: Resurrection." He also writes comic books, including an "X-Men" line. But Mr. Whedon, the son and grandson of television writers, is principally a natural-born small-screen auteur, graced with a quick, idiosyncratic wit and a facility for serial storytelling. In addition to "Buffy," he created that show's spinoff, "Angel," and in 2002, a curious genre hybrid called "Firefly" he had pitched as "Stagecoach" in space.
Fox aired just 11 episodes of "Firefly" before pulling the plug. The network refused to commit, but not so the fans who, as they did with "Buffy," turned this patchwork of fan-boy love and recycled parts into a cult. Evidence of their passion was later reflected in the DVD sales of "Firefly," which were impressive enough for Universal to pony up for a big-screen version. Named after the ramshackle spaceship that hauls Mr. Whedon's characters from one far-out adventure to the next, "Serenity" picks up where the series left off, with these plucky, shambling outsiders fighting oppression against impossible odds. As Mr. Whedon knows, the fastest way to a geek's heart is a story about other geeks, albeit ones with good hair and hot bodies.
The story so far: Captain Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), Mal for short, is zipping around 500 years in the future trying to make ends meet by scrounging for freight and hauling passengers. A veteran of a war of independence, Mal fought on the losing side and has yet to cross over to greener, more lucrative pastures. Along with his second in command, Zoe (a ferocious Gina Torres), Mal runs the Serenity with honor, guts and a touch of panic. He is the kind of leader who barks out a rhetorical question - asking if any of the crew want to run the ship - only to be flummoxed when he receives a resounding yes in return. (Mal then stammers to Adam Baldwin's thuggish crew hand that he can't.) Mal's iron glove covers a velvety soft fist.
Mr. Whedon sketches his characters with quick brush strokes, leaving his appealing cast to fill in the holes with banter and serious-looking busywork. Everyone takes to their task well, though only Mal and a fierce Whedonesque creation called River (Summer Glau, a pint-size Barbara Steele) take root. Hot-wired to kill and on the run from her government masters, this spooky beauty floats through the ship in a series of fetching shifts that make her look like an errant Martha Graham dancer, every so often going entertainingly berserk and wreaking Michelle Yeoh-style damage. Underlying River's murderous power - and perhaps her government-induced psychosis - is a lost little girl trying to carve out a place and a self to call her own.
As this scrap of boilerplate narrative suggests, Mr. Whedon is too much of genre savant to take his film anywhere genuinely surprising. He may also be too much of a movie novice to exploit his material as boldly as you might hope. What made "Firefly" stand apart from the usual television dross, beyond Mr. Whedon's chatter and characters, was his fusion of science-fiction tropes with those of the western. Mal wears a gun strapped to his thigh, while a lariat necklace circles Zoe's throat. He peppers his speech with "y'all," and together they travel to dusty towns that look as if they might have been built for a Roy Rogers oater. And just to bring this science-fiction fantasy up to geopolitical speed, every so often somebody spits a curse in Mandarin.
Transposing a western to outer space presented a calculated risk, the stuff of either "Star Trek" legend or kitsch. Yet what was most beautiful about "Firefly" was that Mr. Whedon wasn't afraid of looking silly. Taking its cue from the famous first words of "Star Trek" - "Space, the final frontier" - his show reinvigorated Gene Roddenberry's premise with the sincerity of a true believer. "Star Trek" was born at a time when space travel was cloaked in optimism and cold-war anxiety. "Star Wars," meanwhile, born out of Saturday matinee clichés and in a time of political cynicism, trafficked in a gee-whiz escapism so strong it survived even a recent swerve into realpolitik. In the years since, and for myriad reasons, science fiction, at least in film, has turned Dystopia into a boomtown.
Mr. Whedon shows little interest in recycling the gloom-and-doom scenarios that have become ubiquitous in science-fiction cinema over the last few decades. Mal is no Neo redux; he's closer to Indiana Jones, if absent Harrison Ford's rakishly handsome looks and star magnetism. Like the rest of the cast, Mr. Fillion is a charming performer, but he borrows rather than owns the screen, which dovetails with Mr. Whedon's modest aspirations for this film. As both a writer and a director, he isn't staking a claim on genre; he's just using it for a short while to tell a story about some decent men and women struggling against both the tyranny of bureaucratic control and their own very human failings.
"Serenity" works nicely as a movie, although in blowing his television series up to the big screen, Mr. Whedon has lost some of the woolliness that made "Firefly" such a pleasant oddity. (Alas, he also lost most of the banjos and twangy guitars.) Even with a bigger canvas, Mr. Whedon doesn't do much with the camera. His setups are generally perfunctory: a means to a storytelling end for what is, at heart, a $40 million B-movie. It's too bad there isn't one image here as striking and resonant as the shot that closes the opening-credit sequence in "Firefly," the one with the horses galloping toward the camera as they're buzzed overhead by a spaceship. With this single image, Mr. Whedon announced he had reopened a frontier some of us thought long closed.
"Serenity" is rated PG-13. (Parents strongly cautioned.) Despite some fight scenes, this is a relatively clean PG-13 with little graphic violence and no sexually exploitative snark. |
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Alai
Joined: 02 Oct 2005
Posts: 13
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| Posted: Thu Oct 06, 2005 7:57 pm Post subject: |
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Any news to the amount of money the movie has made outside it's U.S. market? Those numbers are just as important (if not more) to hitting our goal.
Salaam |
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KyleLitke
Joined: 14 Aug 2005
Posts: 64
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| Posted: Thu Oct 06, 2005 10:51 pm Post subject: |
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| Incidentally, anyone notice it's in far fewer screens than Flight Plan and Corpse Bride? If it was on an equal number of screens (and assuming the money went up by the same amount per screen), Serenity would have just beaten out Flight Plan for the #1 spot. |
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Tripdad
Joined: 08 Oct 2005
Posts: 2
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