Turns out, no one interested in ‘Gamer’ OR ‘Surrogates’

Image courtesy iwatchstuff.com

In box office news, it looks like the new Vince Vaughn comedy Couples Retreat will be taking the crown off of Zombieland’s incarnadine head this weekend. In its first week of release, the eight-one minute living dead farce has grossed about $38 million, already covering its indie-like $23.6 million production cost (though probably not its marketing costs, which are typically one to two times its budget).

And before we get to the “failure story” of recent times, let’s look at the one true success story: Paranormal Activity. Paramount just decided to take this “midnight” movie into prime time. It seems like a good move so far; the film has grossed almost $4 million dollars. This may not seem like much. Four million bucks!? Big deal, right? But this movie cost $10,000 to make. Ten thousand. So its box office take for two weeks (of mostly midnight screenings) is 400 times its cost. Not too shabby, indie peeps. Grab your grandpa’s VHS camera and let’s go make us a damn movie!

And now for the failures. Boy howdy. Are people tired of “virtual reality” or what? Neither Gerard Butler’s much-hyped Gamer, nor Bruce Willis’ much-marketed Surrogates motivated the general public to spend its hard-earned welfare-slash-unemployment checks. Gamer’s budget is not readily available, but was surely somewhere around the “usual” eighty-to-a-hundred million mark. Which puts its $20 million domestic take, after a month of wide release, in a pretty harsh perspective that I’m sure has some Lionsgate executives scratching their balding shingles-plagued heads.

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And Surrogates hasn’t fared much better, earning $29 million in its first month of domestic release. Its budget is known: $80 million. Add to that probably another $80 million for P & A and you’ve got a lot of hurt. I’m not sure how Buena Vista will be able to take a good view of those numbers. Will Bruce Willis survive yet another B.O. dud? Well, let’s see here. The dude’s already wrapped the next Kevin Smith comedy and the next (yes, next) Sylvester Stallone war movie, which looks like a parody but could very well not be. Stallone’s not necessarily known for his sense of humor. In addition to Willis, the film about some old covert ops dudes features Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li, Jason Statham, and Eric Roberts. Willis also has three films currently in production or pre-production, in which he plays some sort of government official, some sort of government spy, or some sort of government special ops dude. Such range!

After he’s done with his America, Fuck Yeah! trilogy, it looks like Willis will star in a film version of the violent video game, Kane & Lynch (one review of the game says it’s the closest gaming experience to a Michael Mann film, so it’s wide screen, blue, and features long scenes of men talking; fun game!). Then he’ll play a Radio DJ whose “power of kindness” shtick gets shaken up after a violent act. I’ll be shocked if the film doesn’t U-turn into, basically, The Brave One, but with Willis and not Foster pointing the gun. The Brave One, with balls. After that, it looks like he’ll expand his America, Fuck Yeah! series from trilogy to quartet with an adaptation of Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, the 2004 book by former U.S. chief counter-terrorism adviser Richard A. Clarke. Go get ‘em, tiger. Somebody’s got to provide the world with an alternative to all that namby pamby “can’t we all just get along?” stuff being shot across the globe by team Clooney, right?