SPEARE'S TIPS: THE FILMS OF 5/8 and 5/15 - Star Trek, Next Day Air, Angels and Demons

Well, the summer season got off to a rip-roaring start this past weekend, with X-Men Origins: Wolverine tearing up the box office to the tune of over $85 million in its first three days. This is slightly better than I predicted, but how big a hit it will end up being will be told in the size of its second-week dropoff. One would think that a drop of 40-50% is about likely, but there is a whole heap of competition coming its way.

Granted, the target audience for Wolverine is slightly different than for the films that I’ll be talking about this week, which will be coming out the weeks May 8th and May 15th. Can any of these picks rise to the occasion to challenge Hugh Jackman for box office supremacy, or will they fizzle like Speed Racer and Prince Caspian did in these spots one year ago?

Well, as it pertains to Star Trek, my first impression would be an unqualified no. Going only by the quality of the trailers and early reviews of the film (including the stellar one put on the message boards a few weeks ago by our own beloved Swedgin!), I think this “re-imagining” of the early days of the crew of the ORIGINAL crew of the Enterprise has the potential become an instant classic.

Directed by J.J. Abrams (whose last big film, Cloverfield, was hyped to all hell in January of 2008 and singularly failed to live up to that hype), and written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (who both also co-wrote the script for the upcoming Transformers sequel), Star Trek brings to the big screen, for the very first time, the story of the childhood and adolescence of James T. Kirk, and how he came to enlist in Starfleet, where he would eventually be given command of his own starship, the U.S.S. Enterprise, complete with all of the familiar members of his crew.

You know the characters, but you may not know all of the actors portraying them, which, in my opinion, is a brilliant move by Abrams. The virtually unknown Chris Pine steps in as Kirk, a brash, headstrong youth; Heroes’ Zachary Quinto plays Kirk’s Vulcan first officer Spock; Karl Urban (Doom, LOTR) plays Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy; Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) plays Montgomery “Scotty” Scott; John Cho (Harold and Kumar) plays a young Hikaru Sulu, Anton Yelchin (Charlie Bartlett) plays Pavel Chekov; and Zoe Saldana plays Uhura. But the credits don’t end there; Bruce Greenwood, Ben Cross, Winona Ryder, Clifton Collins Jr., and Jennifer Morrison also have small roles in this film, and the bad guy is played by Eric Bana (Hulk, Munich), whose character, Nero, is a time-traveling Romulan.

I don’t know much about the plot of the movie (and even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you); suffice it to stay that early reviews for Star Trek have been off the charts; Ty Burr of the Boston Globe gave it 4/4 stars, calling it the “best prequel EVER”, and as of May 4th, RottenTomatoes.com currently holds it as “100% fresh”. Those numbers, however early, don’t lie, people.

Early tracking has Star Trek opening somewhere in the $65 million range for its first three days (well, three and a half, actually, given that the film will actually be debuting in many locations at 7pm this Thursday), which should be more than enough to dethrone Wolverine at #1 for the weekend. My only concern is, given the rabid fanboy following that Star Trek has always had, whether the film will appeal to non-Trek fans, despite all of the hype and accolades. Time will tell, I guess.

This film is priced at $30 in the May Ultimate leagues, and $32 in Box Office. For that price, I believe you will accrue no less than $160 million, eleven Top 5 points, four PTA and a User Rating well above 7.0. It may not make as much green, in the long run, as Wolverine or Terminator: Salvation, but it shouldn’t disappoint either. And who knows, if word-of-mouth can keep the ball rolling, it may have a chance to break $200 million (something that no film released on the second week of May has achieved in many, many years).

Also being released on the weekend of May 8th is Next Day Air, an action/comedy brought to us by director Benny Boom, who up until now has primarily been a director of music videos for acts like 50 Cent, Ciara, Nelly, Sean Paul and Keyshia Cole. Judging from the trailer, this film looks almost Guy Ritchie-esque, given its gritty setting and premise and humorous dialogue, not to mention a buttload of gunplay.

The story: Brody (Mike Epps) and Guch (Wood Harris) are small-time crooks who believe their ship has come in when a wacked-out package deliveryman (Donald Faison) misreads an address and drops a box full of high-quality cocaine on their doorstep (that was meant for the dealers that live next door). What follows is a chain of events that one can only guess, as all parties involved try to simultaneously get rich, get righteous and get the f**k out of there alive. Mos Def and Debbie Allen also co-star.

I was going to tell you all to beware of putting this film on your slate because of the now-legendary “African-American” curse, one that causes most films with a primarily non-white cast to have a User Rating well below 5.0. However, the current Rating for Next Day Air is, unbelievably, well over 8.0, and though that may come down a bit once the film is released, I think that this film will not let you down in that category.

Where it WILL let you down, however, is everywhere else. According to Box Office Mojo, this film will be released in barely 1,500 theaters, which means it will be hard-pressed to produce any Top 5 points or meaningful box office numbers at all. Which is a shame… doesn’t Summit Entertainment know how to market any film of theirs that doesn’t involve teenage vampires? Yeah, Knowing did very well, but that film seems to have been the exception rather than the rule. (I still think Push deserved far, far more than it got.)

Priced at only $5 in both leagues, I would suggest this film in Box Office only. Even for such chump change, you’d like your films to give you numbers in more than one category in Ultimate, and I don’t foresee Next Day Air giving you more than one or two Top 5 points, tops. PTA ain’t gonna happen, and I doubt much more than $20 million can reasonably be expected of this film. It seems more like a cool late-night DVD watch than a theater excursion.

According to the roster of upcoming films, the weekend of May 15th contains a whole mess of films; however, all but one of them are scheduled for a limited release (including The Brothers Bloom, which is coming out in New York and Los Angeles and destined for a small expansion later this month). That one, as you can imagine, is a high-priced, high-budget potential blockbuster that is, like Star Trek, also a prequel. It is Angels and Demons, the follow-up to the highly successful 2006 blockbuster, The Da Vinci Code (even though the events of A&D take place before the events of DVC).

Tom Hanks reprises his role as Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon, who is summoned by a European energy organization to investigate the murder of a man whose body is branded with the symbol of the Illuminati, a secret society of scientists who were all but wiped out by the Catholic Church many centuries ago, but are apparently alive and well and planning a terrorist attack against the Vatican. Joining Hanks in this venture are notable actors Ewan McGregor, Stellan Skarsgaard and Armin Mueller-Stahl, as well as Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer (Munich).

It should come as no surprise that this film was greenlit almost immediately after DVC opened to mega-success, pulling in over $110 million in its first week, en route to over $750 million in worldwide grosses. Of course, this film was critically panned by many professional critics, and the reason for its tremendous output can largely be attributed to the controversy that went hand-in-glove with the plot of Dan Brown’s story, and the protestations of the Catholic Church that soon followed, protestations that claimed that the book was blasphemy and that it shamed both Catholicism and Jesus Christ.

Despite the fact that Ron Howard (who is coming off the Academy Award-nominated critical rave Frost/Nixon) is back behind the camera for Angels and Demons, and despite the fact that Tom Hanks, one of Hollywood’s most enduring and successful A-list actors is back in the lead role, I have my doubts that this films will enjoy quite the same following that Da Vinci Code did. For one, the hoopla about the subject matter has long since faded away, and I don’t think the Vatican is going to squawk much about the plot of this film. Not to mention the fact that this is a sequel/prequel, and probably won’t generate much interest outside of fans who either enjoyed the first movie, the books or Tom Hanks in general.

And lest we forget, there are six movies being released this May that have $200 million potential… but logic would dictate that at least one will fall short of its expectations, and I firmly believe that Angels and Demons will be that one. I think that it will win its opening weekend with just over $40 million, putting it just ahead of Star Trek in its second week. While it’s true that this is the most adult-centric film of the six, I think it will lose its legs rather quickly when Terminator, Night at the Museum and Up move into the theaters next door.

I honestly don’t think it is worth the $30 you’d spend in Ultimate leagues ($31 in Box Office). I think it will top out at just over $120 million, picking up nine Top 5 points, three or four PTA (there are a LOT of limited release films coming out this weekend), and a User Rating in the low-to-mid 7’s. Of all the films on the docket that are priced at $30+, I believe that this will give you the lowest return on your investment.


My predictions for the weekend of May 8-10, 2009:

1. Star Trek - $61 million (3 1/2-day total)
2. X-Men Origins: Wolverine - $45 million
3. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past - $8 million
4. Next Day Air - $7 million
5. Obsessed - $6 million

My predictions for the weekend of May 15-17, 2009:

1. Angels and Demons - $41 million
2. Star Trek - $33 million
3. X-Men Origins: Wolverine - $25 million
4. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past - $5 million
5. Who knows?


Well, that will do it for me for another week. Next week, I will be tackling perhaps the most intriguing head-to-head matchup of the summer, as two mega-behemoths vie for contention on the same damn weekend (which happens to be Memorial Day weekend); Terminator: Salvation, starring Christian Bale as John Connor, who tries to lead the remainder of the human race to final victory in the war against the machines; and Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, starring Ben Stiller as the hapless night watchman who must, once again, keep a host of animated exhibits in check. Oh, and Dance Flick, a movie brought to us by the Wayans Brothers, where street/dance films will be spoofed to within an inch of their lives.

Later!

And I just have to add this:

Pretty good numbers Shryke. I like 'em. High 60s seems to be where Trek is heading. In other places, people are predicting 90M WO and 300M totals. Not even Mason and his multipliers can went that far!

I think mid to high 60s seem about right, 90m is ridiculous. I can certainly see at least a 3x multiple though which should see it hit $190m or more. I can't see Wolverine getting that good a multiple, maybe 2.5x, possibly 2.75 at best.

I agree with Angels and Demons though, I can't see it having that big an audience beyond the Dan Brown obsessives, the DVC hype has totally died and I can't see it passing $150m.

Any news on how much Star Trek pulled in last night?


P.S. Woo-hoo! 750!!

Finke posted $7 million