Hollywood Déjà Vu Box Office Breakdown: Summer 2009

All fell to the Fallen—except Harry Potter.

Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (above) ruled supreme as the summer’s biggest sequel—earning $400.6 million through Monday, which marked the official end of the popcorn season—and will likely close 2009 as the U.S.’s high-grossing film of the year.

But everyone’s favorite boy wizard worked enough magic to ensure Harry Potter and the Half-Blood dominated worldwide: $917.2 million vs. Revenge of the Fallen’s $830.6 million. The sixth Harry Potter also will the first since the series kicked off with The Sorcerer’s Stone to cross the $300 million barrier; it’s currently at $297.6 million. It also needs another $21 million worldwide to surpass its predecessor The Order of the Phoenix ($938.2 million) as the franchise’s second highest-grossing entry.

Going 3-D allowed Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaur to give Revenge of the Fallen a run for its money by collecting $808 million worldwide, which is all the more impressive considering only $194.2 million came from the United States. Dawn of the Dinosaur also will pass The Meltdown’s $195.3 million in a few week to become the franchise’s high-grossing entry in the United States.

J.J. Abrams’ ingenious handling of Star Trek as both a prequel and the reboot—with the original TV series recast with younger actors like Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto—resulted in the 11th big-screen voyage of the USS Enterprise being its most popular at $257.1 million. More important, Star Trek finally gained traction overseas, earning a respectable $126.3 million.

With the exception of The Final Destination, which is just two weeks into its release, all other sequels experienced troubling series fatigue. X-Men: Wolverine may have been hit hard at the box office after its workprint was leaked online, but it also had to rely solely on Hugh Jackman’s drawing power rather than the entire X-Men cast. Besides, it deserved its scathing reviews, especially in terms of how it took liberties with the previous trilogy’s mythology. Still, Fox is already moving forward with a second Wolverine.

Ben Stiller’s Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian probably would have benefited from opening in December. Night at the Museum was a perfect holiday offering; Battle of the Smithsonian seemed out of place in the sweltering heat.

Angels & Demons represented Robert Langdon’s first literary adventure, and had it reached theaters before The Da Vinci Code, no one would look at its $484.4 million worldwide gross with slight disappointment. But The Da Vinci Code opened first, and its $758.2 million set a high standard for Tom Hanks and Ron Howard’s Angels & Demons that really proved impossible to meet. Sony’s committed to turning Dan Brown’s third novel The Lost Symbol into a film, and as this is the true sequel to The Da Vinci Code, it should have an advantage over Angels & Demons at the box office.

Perhaps it was too much to expect Terminator Salvation to overcome the loss of the face of the franchise, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Even with the Governator contributing a computer-generated cameo, the fourth Terminator made $25 million less than Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. It really hurt that Christian Bale’s onset ranting and raving earned more attention than his colorless performance as John Connor, which is just as much a fault of the story being so focused on Sam Worthington’s conflicted cyborg. Whether Terminator Salvation spawns another sequel remains to be seen, but it’s already bankrupted its producers.

Lightning didn’t strike twice for Brüno, the second and most certainly last mockumentary spawned from Sacha Baron Cohen’s Da Ali G Show. Unlike Borat, which received universal acclaim, Brüno seemed stale. It may have done better had it won over gay and lesbian groups. But Brüno did significant damage in its bid to squash homophobia by perpetuating the gay stereotypes it sought to shatter. No wonder Brüno made just half of Borat’s $261.5 million worldwide gross.

It doesn’t matter whether Halloween II barely makes $30 million, or just a little more than half of its predecessor’s $58.2 million. Rob Zombie’s grubby sequel to his Halloween reboot cost just $15 million, so the cash-strapped Weinstein Co. has more than enough reason to rush Halloween 3D into production for summer 2010 with My Bloody Valentine’s Patrick Lussier possibly directing. The Weinstein Co. would have reaped more at the box office had it not put it against the 3-D The Final Destination.

Remakes
Was it really worth updating The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3? Or giving Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol a contemporary makeover as the romantic comedy Ghosts of Girlfriends Past? Or bothering to turn the cult TV series Land of the Lost into a witless Will Ferrell star vehicle?

Absolutely not.

Without a grieving John Travolta available to promote The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, the Tony Scott-directed remake earned $101.1 million worldwide, or $1.1 million than it cost to make.

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past didn’t attract the same large female-oriented audience that usually come out for a Matthew McConaughey romcom. Time for the bongo-bashing sex symbol to take a break from romantic comedies.

Universal has a pretty bad track record when it comes to turning TV shows into feature films. Think Miami Vice, Sgt. Bilko, The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle, and Thunderbirds. Now add Land of the Lost to that list. With Ferrell wearing out his act as the lovable goofball, and director Brad Silberling offering special effects cheesier than anything found in a 1970s sci-fi TV show, Land of the Lost was bound to crash and burn. Universal should have played it straight and offered a Jurassic Park-style thrill ride.

Potential New Franchises
Sure, the buzz was loud around The Hangover, but who would have thought the what-happens-in-Vegas-stays-in-Vegas frat-boy farce would become the highest-grossing R-rated comedy? No wonder a sequel is in the works for summer 2011.

Paramount likely envisioned G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra as the next Transformers. Not even close. Proud to be loud and dumb, G.I. Joe may yet hit the $300 million worldwide total Paramount’s predicting. Even if that’s the case, is there really any enthusiasm for a sequel? Imagine how much worse G.I. Joe would have done had Paramount screened it for discerning critics.

Thanks to the hype surrounding its Comic-Con debut, District 9 came out of nowhere to garner some of the year’s reviews and more than triple its $30 million budget. Sony wants a sequel, which presumably will be set three years after the events of the Peter Jackson-produced sci-fi apartheid allegory.

Put 3-D glasses on a kid—like my 5-year-old son—and they will sit through anything. Case in point: G-Force. With its daring-do guinea pig secret agents, countless explosions, robot-like beings and a villain voiced by Nicolas Cage, G-Force played exactly how you imagined Jerry Bruckheimer’s first 3-D film would play. At $80 million, G-Force was worth Disney’s investment, so don’t be surprised if the agents of G-Force rushed into action for second, more dangerous mission.

The following is a breakdown of how all sequels, remakes, and new/potential franchises fared this summer, based on figures tracked by Box Office Mojo.

SEQUELS

1. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
U.S. Total: $400.6 million
Worldwide Total: $830.6 million
Previous Entry: Transformers ($319.2 million U.S./$709.7 million worldwide)

2. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
U.S. Total: $297.6 million
Worldwide Total: $917.2 million
Previous Entry: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix ($292 million U.S./$938.2 million worldwide)

3. Star Trek
U.S. Total: $257.1 million
Worldwide Total: $383.5 million
Previous Entry: Star Trek: Nemesis ($43.2 million U.S./$67.3 million worldwide)

4. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
U.S. Total: $194.2 million
Worldwide Total: $808 million
Previous Entry: Ice Age: The Meltdown ($195.3 million U.S./$655.3 million worldwide)

5. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
U.S. Total: $179.8 million
Worldwide Total: $363.4 million
Previous Entry: X-Men: The Last Stand ($234.3 million U.S./$459.3 million worldwide)

6. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
Total: $176.7 million
Worldwide Total: $404.4 million
Previous Entry: Night at the Museum ($250.8 million U.S./$574.4 million worldwide)

7. Angels & Demons
U.S. Total: $133.3 million
Worldwide Total: $484.4 million
Previous Entry: The Da Vinci Code ($217.5 million U.S./$758.2 million worldwide)

8. Terminator Salvation
U.S. Total: $125.3 million
Worldwide Total: $371.3 million
Previous Entry: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines ($150.3 million U.S./$433.3 million worldwide)

9. Brüno
U.S. Total: $60 million
Worldwide Total: $136.9 million
Previous Entry: Borat ($128.5 million U.S./$261.5 million worldwide)

10. The Final Destination
U.S. Total: $50.4 million
Worldwide Total: $82.9 million
Previous Entry: Final Destination 3 ($54 million U.S./$113.2 million worldwide)

11. Halloween II
U.S. Total: $26.9 million
Worldwide Total: $26.9 million
Previous Entry: Halloween ($58.2 million U.S./$80.2 million worldwide)

12. Soul Power
U.S. Total: $172,276
Worldwide Total: $215,066
Previous Entry: When We Were Kings ($2.7 million U.S.)

REMAKES

1. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
U.S. Total: $65.4 million
Worldwide Total: $101.1 million

2. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
U.S. Total: $55.2 million
Worldwide Total: $97 million

3. Land of the Lost
U.S. Total: $49.4 million
Worldwide Total: $62.5 million

4. Easy Virtue
U.S. Total: $2.6 million
Worldwide Total: $16.8 million

5. In the Loop
U.S. Total: $2 million
Worldwide Total: $5.6 million

NEW/POTENTIAL FRANCHISES

1. The Hangover
U.S. Total: $272.1 million
Worldwide Total: $440.4 million

2 G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
U.S. Total: $141 million
Worldwide Total: $279.9 million

3. G-Force
U.S. Total: $115.4 million
Worldwide Total: $167.8 million

4. District 9
U.S. Total: $103.3 million
Worldwide Total: $117.7 million

Transformers (2 out of 4 stars)

Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Tyrese Gibson, Josh Duhamel, Anthony Anderson, Megan Fox, Rachael Taylor, John Turturro, and Jon Voight.
Director: Michael Bay
The Verdict: How easy it would be to take director Michael Bay to task for making us pay for the privilege of watching the longest and most expensive commercial ever made. A typically loud and dumb effects-driven spectacle from the adrenaline junkie responsible for Armageddon and the Bad Boys shoot ’em ups, Transformers is—and was always destined to be—nothing more than a 144-minute, $150 million attempt to sell more products in the 23-year-old Hasbro line of toy robots. And no doubt Hasbro execs are rubbing their hands with glee. Like such comic-book superheroes as Spider-Man and Superman, Transformers appeals to fans young and young at heart. So don’t be surprised if it’s the Kevin Smith lookalike sitting next to you in the movie theater who’s cheering the most when Optimus Prime makes his grand entrance. Oh, and let’s not forget these alien robots conveniently transform into vehicles straight off the General Motors assembly line. Guess Porsches are too flashy for these robots. No one bothers pretending there’s a particular reason for this film to exist other than for product placement purposes. How these mechanical extra-terrestrials came to be isn’t even addressed in what passes as a script by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. And why Optimus Prime’s honorable Autobots are at war with Megatron’s destructive Decepticons is glossed over. All you need to know is that both races of robots are on Earth—masquerading as cars, helicopters and tanks—in search of a power source called the Allspark. And Shia LaBeouf is the only human who can help the Autobots stop the Decepticons from wiping out humanity. There are shades of Live Free and Die Hard in Transformers, what with the Decepticons crippling the government’s network of computer systems. But so what? All that matters is that Bay shows the robots—all cursed with cheesy names like Scorponok or Ironhide—transforming into their vehicle of choice or brutally beating the rust out of each other. There’s no denying that Transformers boasts the best special effects seen so far this summer—and that includes the upcoming Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix—and perhaps the most mesmerizing to be put on screen since The Matrix. These shiny metal giants are just as swift, imposing and impressive as the shape-shifting T-1000 from James Cameron’s CG-pioneering Terminator 2: Judgment Day. And you can’t take your eyes off them when they go at it like Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots on steroids. (Then you immediately put your hands over your ears when Optimus Prime et al open their mouths and engage in banal banter that could only have been written by a computer.) Unfortunately, Bay takes his sweet time getting to the robo-a-robo fisticuffs. Aside from the initial Decepticon attack on a U.S. military base in Quatar, Bay wastes so much of Transformers’ first hour on LaBeouf’s clichéd and unfunny efforts to hook up with Megan Fox that you think you had stumbled into Disturbia by mistake. Fox’s high school hottie sole fuction is to look good riding alongside LaBeouf in his yellow Chevy Camaro, which just so happens to be Bumblebee, an Autobot assigned to protect LaBeouf. So why does LaBeouf need a bodyguard? Turns out he owns a pair of glasses that point the way to the Allspark. Whatever. Once again channeling a Say Anything-era John Cusack, the anxious LaBeouf makes for a nerdy but plucky hero. At least he gets to flex what passes for his muscles. Fergie’s main squeeze Josh Duhamel and 2 Fast 2 Furious’ Tyrese Gibson barely get to fire their guns. Then there’s John Turturro, who’s so reluctant to take Transformers seriously that his manic secret government agent appears to be straight out of a Mel Brooks parody. LaBeouf’s emergence as an unlikely young man of action—he’s now shooting the fourth Indiana Jones adventure—means that the days of relying on such monosyllabic killing machines as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone to right all wrongs are history. Too bad there’s nothing LaBeouf can do to save Transformers from itself. “No sacrifice, no victory,” LaBeouf yells as the going gets tough and the tough get going. No sacrifice has been made by Bay to take Transformers out of the toy store and into theaters. But considering Transformers never dares to transcend its source material, Bay achieves nothing more than a hollow victory. Then again, what else was to be expected?
Release Date: July 3, 2007
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 144 minutes

Shia LaBeouf Q&A: Transformers

JUNE 7, 2007—Shia LaBeouf doesn’t have time to get the summertime blues.

Hot on the heels of the Rear Window-inspired Disturbia comes two potential summer blockbusters that could make LaBeouf one of Hollywood’s most sought-after young stars.

In the CG-animated Surf’s Up (June 8), LaBeouf voices a penguin desperate to become a champion surfer. He’ll then try to save mankind from malevolent shape-changing robots in Transformers (July 3), director Michael Bay’s big-budget attempt to turn the toy line into a film franchise.

During his March trip to Miami to promote Disturbia, LaBeouf shared his thoughts on:

Growing up on Transformers
That’s the male Barbie of my generation. That and G.I. Joe.

What sets Transformers apart from his other big-budget endeavors, Constantine and I, Robot
For me, it’s a huge change. It’s the first one I’m starring in. I’m No. 1 on the call sheet. I, Robot, I was barely in. I was only there because Will [Smith] personally asked for me. It wasn’t like Transformers, where I’m a die-hard fanatic before I show up on set, where I can’t wait to see Bumblebee like the next guy. There are few franchises in general where you can walk into a tattoo shop and see someone get a Decepticons logo on their back. There are few followings that are that loyal. People are loyal to Transformers—my age, your age, it’s a huge generational gap. And the reason it’s different, when you think about a dude in a cape, a guy in a Spider-Man costume, they’re great ideas, historical ideas, but is it really tangible? Realistic? Is somebody really going to save me in a cape? Do you really want to be saved by that guy? Do I want him to hold me as we fly through the sky? No. Whereas something like Transformers, technology taking over humanity is a real idea. Look at the war now in Iraq, where we’re using robots to pick up bombs, we’re using robots to drop bombs. It’s all robotic. It’s like a realistic thought. Cars do transform. They transform into submarines. I went to JPL (The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory) to look at some of this stuff on the Mars Rover mission. That thing is humongous. You don’t think it’s as big as it as, and it can do everything. It’s self-sustaining. It doesn’t need a recharge. These things have lives. So that blew my mind.

Transformers’ stressful shoot
It was tough. We shot it in 80 days. Pirates they shot in 340. To put it in perspective, Pirates has six or seven set pieces. In Hollywood talk, that’s big action sequences. We have 15 or 16. Eighty days is nothing. But [director] Michael Bay moves like a machine. The dude’s a monster.

Working with Transformers director Michael Bay
He’s a perfectionist. He’s completely prepared. He knows everybody’s job. He’s an adrenaline junkie. There are things he could have done on green screen. They hung me off of a building—the Orpheum Theatre—about 40 stories up. Then they blew the building up. You could have done that on green screen. But we didn’t do it that way. Mike doesn’t work that way. He likes to blow stuff up. He likes to build robots. He likes to make a bumblebee you can sit there and talk with for real. He’s a robot and he’s 40 feet tall.

The physical demands of making Transformers
I was running 20 miles a day it felt like. Every day was running and screaming, running and screaming, and running and screaming, and explosions. On Disturbia, we shot the car crash at the beginning of the movie in two or three days. A Transformers set moves like this: you’ll show up, you’ll do your hair and makeup, you’ll go to set, they’ll blow a car up, then they’ll light 25 guys on fire, they’ll drop a helicopter, they’ll blow up the Orpheum Theater, then they’ll have a robot walk the streets, they’ll shut the streets down, and they’ll blow the streets up. This is all before lunch with no rehearsal. It’s just a different set.

Transformers meeting audience expectations
It’s just a crazy movie, man. It’s just the sickest film of the year. I’ll put it to you like this way: Optimus’ arm has 15,000 moving pieces that all conjoin into a Rubik Cube-like arm. ILM, the company that did the graphics, did Pirates. ILM is the graphics king…. They said they never did anything like this. It’s going to do what The Matrix did for action films. It’s just going to blow people’s minds.

Surf’s Up arriving so soon after Happy Feet
Look at the traits of animation. A Bug’s Life and Antz. Shark Tale and [Finding] Nemo. You can’t copy a movie. It’s not like we copied [Happy Feet]. These movies take four years to make. It’s impossible to copy. The fact that there’s so much penguin action right now is kinda weird. It’s like Kismet. But I think the reason for that is that the penguin is the most human bird. It kinda looks like they’re wearing tuxedos. They hang out in packs like humans, and they’re social birds. So there’s a fun thing to play with there. People like penguins. But again, animation is not a genre. It’s a type of film. Comparing us to Happy Feet is like comparing Rent to Spinal Tap. It’s two different genres. It’s the same type. Every movie made on 35mm is not the same film. Every movie made in animation is not the same film.

What separates Surf’s Up from other animated films
Surf’s Up is more dramatic than most animated films. There’s a really dramatic storyline. And it’s a mockumentary. The tagline is, “Based on a true story.” That’s our thing. It’s like set up like The Real World, where you have these interviews [in front of] the camera. It’s very human, so the comedy works in a different way. It’s not slapstick—chicken falls, scraps his leg, ha, ha, ha. It’s not that at all.
This interview was previously posted June 7, 2007 on Film South Florida.com.