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Here’s a fun fact to share with your disbelieving friends/cats: Before this weekend, do you know what was the highest-opening baseball movie of all time? ANSWER: The Benchwarmers, starring David Spade, Rob Schneider, and Napoleon Dynamite. Tread not on mine monocle friends, for in my surprise it has fallen. See? This is why I hate baseball. Anyway, 42 has since stolen the title (just like Jackie Robinson stealing a base!), which is nice, as it seems by all accounts to have been a perfectly fine movie. A nice movie for nice people.
1. 42 (Warner Bros.) – $27.3 million
2. Scary Movie 5 (The Weinstein Company) – $15.1 million
3. The Croods (Fox/DreamWorks) – $13.2 million ($143 mil.)
4. G.I. Joe: Retaliation (Paramount) – $10.8 million ($102 mil.)
5. Evil Dead (Sony) – $9.5 million ($41 mil.)
6. Jurassic Park 3D (Universal) – $8 million ($31 mil.)
7. Olympus Has Fallen (FilmDistrict) – $6.8 million ($81 mil.)
8. Oz: The Great and Powerful (Disney) – $4.8 million ($219 mil.)
9. Tyler Perry’s Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor(Lionsgate) – $4.3 million ($45 mil.)
10. The Place Beyond The Pines (Focus) – $3.8 million ($5.1 mil.) [Indiewire]
Meanwhile, while 42 was out-pacing expectations, Scary Movie 5 was “bombing” or “tanking” depending on who you asked. True, $15.1 million is well down from Scary Movie 4‘s $40.2 million and Scary Movie 3‘s $48 million, but it also only cost $20 million to make, and even that was probably only because Lindsay Lohan was in it and robbed them blind. $15 million is a step in the right direction, but I don’t want to live in a world where Simon Rex lazily regurgitating jokes from 7 years ago earns its budget back. I want to live in a world where everyone wears foam cowboy hats with their names on them and cats are currency, but that’s another story.
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I couldn’t believe it to be true so I looked up Moneyball’s opening vs Benchwarmers and sure enough Benchwarmers barely beat Moneyball. Although Benchwarmers had more screens and Moneyball had more average.
I was just about to look up how much Moneyball made its first week, and then I saw your comment. Dammit. I love Moneyball.
I’m trying to figure out why I had absolutely no desire to see 42. I think it has to do with being averse to any period piece that takes place between the 20s and 70s. That’s why I’m setting my screenplay “Cold Warrior” in the Reagan Administration. In “Cold Warrior” two young men separated by half a world use MMA to attempt to answer the same question: Why *didn’t* 9/11 happen during the Cold War? Those young men? You guessed it, Vince and Fedor Emelianenko.
Nah, it’s just cuz you’re RAYCESS
Of course 42 did well at the box office. It looked very safe and wholesome. Like Jay Leno. Willie Mays said that the actors did a good job pretending to play like baseball players.
More like Blackie Robinson, amirite?