In the new live-action/CG-animated comedy Hop, E.B. (voiced by Russell Brand), the teenage son of the Easter Bunny, is on a mission to save Easter
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And proving that the family audience is overrated for an Oscar-winning drama with no action, The King's Speech opened in its new PG-13 version, with the F word count drastically reduced, and earned $1.2 million. That's a 31% drop from the previous weekend's take for the original R-rated film. The gross might have fallen anyway because practically everyone who wanted to see The King's Speech has done so, but it scotches the belief of the film's distributor, Harvey Weinstein, that there's loads of gelt to be made by chopping up a beloved movie.
Hollywood's First Quarter: Earnings Way Down
Whether eviscerating films or making new ones like the old ones, nothing has worked this year. At the end of the industry's first quarter (13 weeks), every indicator shows that business is down from the first three months of 2010. By the end of March last year, the top five new films had earned $704.1 million in the domestic market: Alice in Wonderland, $293.5 million; Shutter Island, $120.6 million; Valentine's Day, $109.9 million; The Book of Eli, $94 million; and Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, $86.1 million. The top five films so far this year have earned only $488.9 million: Rango, $113.8 million; Just Go with It, $101.4 million; The Green Hornet, $98.3 million; Gnomeo & Juliet, $96.9 million; and Battle Los Angeles, $78.5 million. That's a 30% drop for the showcase items, only two of which have limped past the $100 million mark. (Thank you, Johnny Depp and Adam Sandler.)
It gets worse. By the end of March last year, eight of the 13 weekends had boasted a film earning at least $40 million. So far in 2011, no film has earned that much. On six weekends this year, the top-grossing film has earned less than $20 million. That didn't happen once in the same stretch of 2010. And if you argue that last year's early numbers were skewed because of the all-time hit Avatar, then, O.K., we'll take the James Cameron film out of the 2010 mix: even then, there were only three weekends when the box-office runner-up to Avatar finished below $20 million.
Because of a fluke in the calendar, this is the 13th week of 2011, as Hollywood sees it. Last year, this would have been the 14th. How did the audience respond to the first big movie of April 2010: the remake of Clash of the Titans? That opening weekend, moviegoers paid $61.2 million to see it — or nearly as much as the combined revenue for this weekend's top three new releases ($66.7 million). There's an old saying that could apply to the movie business right now: it's grotesque and growing tesquer.
The studio moguls had better hope that moviegoers are saving their expendable income for the summer season, which begins at the end of this month and which should kick off handsomely with Fast Five, latest in the Fast and the Furious car-crash series. Depp's fourth Pirates of the Caribbean sojourn and Cooper's second Hangover, plus a sequel to Kung Fu Panda, should get crowds into theaters. Whatever it takes, Hollywood will need more than a hip-hopping Easter Bunny this season to put the spring back in its step.
Here are the Sunday, April 3, estimates of this weekend's top-grossing pictures in North American theaters, as reported by Box Office Mojo:
1. Hop, $38.1 million, first weekend
2. Source Code, $15.05 million, first weekend
3. Insidious, $13.5 million, first weekend
4. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules, $10.2 million; $38.4 million, second week
5. Limitless, $9.4 million; $55.6 million, third week
6. The Lincoln Lawyer, $7.05 million; $39.6 million, third week
7. Sucker Punch, $6.1 million; $29.9 million, second week
8. Rango, $4.6 million; $113.8 million, fifth week
9. Paul, $4.3 million; $31.9 million, third week
10. Battle Los Angeles, $3.5 million; $78.5 million, fourth week