I will keep it brief this week, as the box office took a break -- at least as far as new releases are concerned -- for the first weekend of the new year.

Marley & Me maintained its lead on Adam Sandler's Bedtime Stories, despite the latter holding up a bit better. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button's staying power doesn't seem terribly impressive, as it took a tumble comparable to the other big Christmas releases. All else equal, it looks like it will end up at around $110 million. If it gets a slew of Oscar nominations on the 22nd, that could change things.

Slumdog Millionare didn't expand this weekend, but saw a 10% bump in ticket sales anyhow. That's because it's great and everyone loves it.

That's it. I said I'd keep it brief. Here's the full top 10:

1 - Marley & Me (Fox) - $24.05 ($6,862) - $106.51
2 - Bedtime Stories (Sony) - $20.32 ($5,515) - $85.35
3 - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Paramount) - $18.40 ($9.036) - $79.01
4 - Valkyrie (MGM/UA) - $14.04 ($5,055) - $60.69
5 - Yes Man (Warner Bros.) - $13.85 ($4,033) - $79.41
6 - Seven Pounds (Sony) - $10.00 ($3,626) - $60.04
7 - The Tale of Despereaux (Universal) - $7.02 ($2,271) - $43.74
8 - Doubt (Miramax) - $5.03 ($3,909) - $18.73
9 - The Day the Earth Stood Still (Fox) - $4.85 ($2,075) - $74.30
10 - Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight) - $4.77 ($7,794) - $28.78

Numbers courtesy of Box Office Mojo

Next week sees the first official 2009 releases: Bride Wars and the David S. Goyer horror film The Unborn go wide, while Not Easily Broken opens on 600 screens.

Christmas fell on a Thursday this year, leading to a very lucrative four-day weekend for all but one of the Christmas Day openers.

The pattern has always been to open one, maybe two big films around Christmas. This year we got five. Marley & Me was the best family option, and led the pack with $51.7 million over the long weekend, setting a Christmas Day record in the process. Good word-of-mouth is likely -- the audience reaction at the showing I saw can only be described as "epic." I think I may have actually caught some inanimate objects crying toward the end. Scarves, handbags, etc.

Adam Sandler's Bedtime Stories was next, underperforming slightly with $38.6 million. Sandler is somewhat untested in the PG family film arena, but I had expected Bedtime Stories to land somewhere in the vicinity of Click, which grossed $40 million on a three-day weekend in June. Bedtime Stories' $28 million three-day is the lowest for a film headlined by Sandler since Eight Crazy Nights in 2002, or if you think that doesn't count, since Little Nicky in 2000. Of course since Bedtime Stories opened on a Thursday, using the three-day number isn't quite fair. In any event, the fact that Marley took off certainly didn't help.

The third-place, $39 million finish for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a draw. That the heady, nearly three-hour drama was able to compete in this marketplace is surely a relief to Paramount, but the movie is so expensive ($150 million) that people were probably hoping for more. On the other hand, $30 million for Valkyrie -- which people had written off as a stinker after some release date shuffling and an upswing in general Tom Cruise negativity -- is cause for some high-fiving at MGM/UA.

The pre-Christmas weekend was good to Jim Carrey, Will Smith and an animated mouse. The rest of the top five was filled out by holdovers from previous weeks, including Four Christmases in its fourth week of release. Here's the top five:

1. Yes Man: $18.2 million
2. Seven Pounds: $14.8 million
3. The Tale of Despereaux: $10.1 million
4. The Day the Earth Stood Still: $9.9 million
5. Four Christmases: $7.7 million

Santa is leaving five presents under the tree for movie fans. Whether they contain coal or a GI Joe with Kung Fu Grip remains to be seen. All five of these are opening on Thursday, Christmas day, rather than the usual Friday.

Bedtime Stories
What's It All About: Adam Sandler stars in this comedy about a man who realizes that the fanciful tales he's telling his niece and nephew are coming true.
Why It Might Do Well: This seems tailor-made for people who liked Sandler's 2006 film Click which had a $40 million opening weekend and went on to earn $237 million worldwide.
Why It Might Not Do Well: Rottentomatoes.com is currently rating the film 21% rotten.
Number of Theaters: 3,500
Prediction: $36 million

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
What's It All About: Brad Pitt stars in a film based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald story about a man who is born at the age of 80 and ages in reverse.
Why It Might Do Well: Mr. Pitt carries some serious box office clout, the trailer looks intriguing and Rottentomatoes.com give the film 78%.
Why It Might Not Do Well: It is to laugh.
Number of Theaters: 2,900
Prediction: $22 million

You really expect a movie headlined by Will Smith -- the consensus Biggest Movie Star in the World -- to at least break $20 million in its opening weekend. You'd have to go back to 2001's Ali to find one that didn't. Instead, Seven Pounds -- poorly reviewed and marketed to emphasize the central mystery in a way that turned out mystifying -- played second fiddle to Jim Carrey's Yes Man, pulling in $16 million to Yes Man's $18.1 million.

The Seven Pounds result is actually not terribly surprising, even given the Will Smith factor -- the movie is a morose downer, with none of the uplifting, holiday-appropriate draw of 2006's affable The Pursuit of Happyness (another Smith-Gabriele Muccino collaboration), and the people looking for that sort of thing have a lot to choose from this time of year, most of it carrying more cred. I'm a bit more taken aback by Yes Man's relatively weak opening. For a high-concept Jim Carrey comedy, opening a good three weeks after the last big light-hearted offering, $18 million is uninspiring. It's in the same ballpark as Fun with Dick and Jane, opening around the same time three years ago, but that one went up against three other comedies opening the same weekend, and was harder to market. I wonder if Jim Carrey's draw might be waning a bit.

There's a story making the rounds -- originating, as best I can tell, with this post over at Yahoo! Movies -- making the case that this past weekend's minor computer-animated effort Delgo is, to paraphrase, the biggest wide-release bomb of all time.

Is that right? As usual, it depends on how you look at it. If you limit your scope to films released in over 2000 theaters -- Delgo occupied 2,160 -- then the raw numbers back up this claim: Delgo's $237 weekend per-screen average and $511,920 gross easily top the chart of all-time worst openings in that category. On the other hand, just this September a quasi-documentary called Proud American opened on 750 screens and managed an even more impressive $128 per-screen average. And Delgo even has competition this December: just the week before, the Alan Rickman action comedy Nobel Son opened on 893 screens to a comparable $374 per-screen average.

Both Delgo and Nobel Son were distributed by Freestyle Releasing, an independent distributor-for-hire. Freestyle fared slightly better with The Haunting of Molly Hartley over Halloween and much better with this summer's limited-release Bottle Shock. The lesson here, I think, is that unless you've got something that's easy to market (e.g. the PG-13 horror of Molly Hartley) and the budget to market it, an independently-arranged wide (or semi-wide) release is a very dicey proposition. Trying to shove a low-profile animated family film into the marketplace during the holidays is even dicier.

Delgo may be the biggest wide-release flop of all time, but no one will remember its failure like they remember Cutthroat Island and Last Action Hero: not because Delgo was low-budget (it reportedly cost $40 million), but because it was, for all intents and purposes, set up to fail.

Whoa! Keanu Reeves may have won the popularity contest with his one-note performance as an alien, but specialty audiences came out in big numbers for a variety of limited releases, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo. In addition to the films mentioned by Eugene in his overall look at the charts -- Gran Torino, Doubt, The Reader, Slumdog Millionaire -- other good performers included Steven Soderbergh's Che and Gus Van Sant's Milk. Che inspired sell-outs at the two theaters where it opened in New York and Los Angeles, despite its four-hour plus running-time. Milk expanded to 328 theaters and had a per-screen average just a little less than The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Amidst that high-powered competition, Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy more than held its own, earning $10,700 per screen at the two theaters in New York (Film Forum) and Los Angeles (Laemmle Sunset 5) where it opened. No doubt the film benefited from the presence of Michelle Williams in the lead role, which is an odd thing in itself. Her celebrity status, such as it is, accrues from her relationship with Heath Ledger, but her own career, especially post-Dawson's Creek, bespeaks her interest in pursuing roles in the most independent of films.

If Williams' name value makes more people curious to check out Wendy and Lucy, so much the better. Summarizing the reviews, Eric D. Snider wrote: "The consensus is that it's a tender, beautifully shot, emotionally intimate little film." Reichardt's previous film, Old Joy, was a quiet masterpiece. Wendy and Lucy expands into suburban Los Angeles this coming Friday, and then it will slowly roll out to other theaters nationwide over the next couple of months.

The weekend's sole big-budget multiplex offering -- the sappy alien-invasion remake The Day the Earth Stood Still -- opened well with $31 million. But the bigger news lies under the top 10. This was the weekend that Doubt and Gran Torino began their elaborate platform releases, which Miramax and Warner Bros. (respectively) hope will result in multiple Oscar nominations. Doubt opened on 15 screens and grossed $525,000 for a $35,000 per-screen average. Gran Torino -- a goofy, entertaining little movie that's only an awards contender because of Clint Eastwood's involvement -- opened to $284,000 on 6 screens for $47,333 per screen.

Another piece of Oscar bait, The Reader, opened with marginally less fanfare, ending up with $170,000 on 8 screens ($21,250 per screen).

These sets of numbers are promising, but the real test for these movies is what happens once they expand beyond their ultra-limited initial releases. Slumdog Millionare, for example, is handling its slow expansion very well, with $13,000 per-screen on 170 screens, after five weeks.

There's not much to say about the other wide new releases. Nothing Like the Holidays, Overture's niche-y Christmas offering, was predictably lackluster, opening to $3.5 million. The computer-animated Delgo was another flop for Freestyle Releasing (which, as a commenter helpfully pointed out last week, is a for-hire distributor that has nothing to do with the production of its films) with less than $1 million on over 2000 screens.

The only other thing I want to point out this week is that Quantum of Solace may have trouble setting the all-time Bond franchise record I had expected it to set handily. It has not held up well after a strong opening, and is now $10 million shy of Casino Royale's $167 million. Its weekend gross was $3.8 million, so it's going to be close.

The full top 10 -- and then some -- is under the jump.

Eight years ago, Zhang Ziyi soared into public consciousness as the tempestuous heroine in Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. She's continued to score in sumptuous epics like Hero, House of Flying Daggers, and The Banquet, as well as off-beat pleasures such as Seijun Suzuki's Princess Raccoon. (Let's all try to forget Memoirs of a Geisha, shall we?) In her latest film, which opened in China last week, she plays a Peking Opera singer.

Forever Enthralled is the English title of Mei Lanfang; the name of a real-life, internationally-recognized opera star well-known for playing female roles over the course of a career that lasted more than 50 years. Leon Lai, a veteran Hong Kong actor and pop singer, takes on the challenging assignment to play the legendary character, while Zhang plays fellow performer Meng Xiaodong, who was known for playing bearded men (?!). The two singers met, married, became parents, and divorced, all between 1925 and 1931.

At a press conference (pictured above, thanks to Ziyifilms), Zhang said: "The hardest thing is walking, wearing these really tall boots ... I practiced that for a very long time." All that practice paid off. Variety Asia Online reports that the film is "on course to quality for a hit," though it probably won't break any records.

Chen Kaige directed; years ago he made Farewell My Concubine, * also set in the opera world. More recently he ventured into epic action territory with the spectacular misfire The Promise. My friend Todd Brown at Twitch posted the Forever Enthralled trailer, which looks like a great match of stars, director, and material. IMDb lists Miramax as having US theatrical rights, though it's not listed on their site. I hope we get to see this one without having to wait forever.

* UPDATE: Title corrected. Thanks to Larry for pointing out my mistake.

Results were less than stellar for last week's new releases, as none of them finished in the top five. Cadillac Records and Nobel Son were fairly small releases, but with 2,500 theaters under its belt I had expected a little more from Punisher: War Zone. Theaters were dominated by holdovers from previous weeks, and here's the top five:

1. Four Christmases
2. Bolt
3. Twilight
4. Australia
5. Quantum of Solace

This week sees the arrival of three newbies:

The Day the Earth Stood Still
What's It All About: In this remake of the 1951 science fiction classic, Keanu Reeves plays the role of Klaatu (made famous by Michael Rennie), an alien who has come to earth accompanied by a powerful robot to bitch slap the human race so we'll stop acting like jerks.
Why It Might Do Well: You don't get a lot of science fiction in theaters these days and this looks like some dark brooding apocalyptic fun.
Why It Might Not Do Well: Yes, that's the guy from Point Break playing the alien.
Number of Theaters: 3,400
Prediction: $54 million

Living up to expectations, at least at the box office, Ong Bak 2 opened in Thailand last Friday and did big business. The action flick, starring Tony Jaa, is on track to become the biggest local hit of the year, according to Variety Asia Online.

The production ran into trouble earlier this year when Jaa walked off the set and disappeared into the jungle to think things over. Rumors were that the stunt man turned martial arts star, who came to worldwide prominence with Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior and The Protector, had bitten off more than he could chew with his first turn in the director's chair. Jaa indicated that it was all about the production company providing enough money to make the movie he wanted to make. Old friends came back on board, differences were ironed out, and the result was a big opening.

Wise Kwai provided links to stills, a synopsis, and a translation of a press conference, so head over there for the pre-release publicity. What about the film itself? I haven't found any reviews yet, though a commenter named Brad at the blog Enjoy Thai Movies wrote: "I saw the film last night. It's terrific with a great story and amazing action. Tony Jaa commands the screen with a towering performance. Given his much publicized recent problems, it's great to see Jaa pull through with such a wonderful film. It will be major hit, I am sure."

As for US viewers, we're waiting on The Weinstein Co., which, as far as I know, still holds distribution rights. Their web site still doesn't list the film, and I'm not terribly optimistic about a theatrical release. *

* UPDATE: Our friend Wise Kwai has just posted his (almost entirely) positive review -- check it out -- and also says below that the Weinsteins bowed out of distribution some time ago. Here's hoping someone else picks it up.

In limited release, Frost/Nixon, Ron Howard's adaptation of Peter Morgan's stage play, had the highest per-screen average of the weekend ($60,000 each at three screens), according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo, but it's not an indie. Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire ($18,026 per screen at 78 theaters) and Gus Van Sant's Milk ($17,071 per screen at 99 theaters) held up very well as they expanded in their fourth and second weeks, respectively, but we talked about them last week.

Instead, let's look at the resiliency of Philippe Claudel's I've Loved You So Long. Now in its seventh week, the French-language drama starring Kristin-Scott Thomas still had the 7th-highest per-screen average among all movies ($3,020 average, 51 screens). The film's cumulative take is a modest $1.76 million, which likely is a good return for distributor Sony Pictures Classics, and it will undoubtedly do very well when it's released on DVD in a couple of months.

My personal opinion is close to what Jeffrey D. Anderson expressed: "These characters are always subservient to the furthering of the story; the story itself squashes them." The popular appeal of the film is readily apparent, though: (1) Kristin Scott Thomas has a degree of name recognition in the arthouse world; (2) she gives an exquisite, finely-tuned performance; (3) it's in French, which is the default language for anguish and loss; (4) it revolves around a mother and her family, not a romance, which is a huge, refreshing relief; (5) it's rarely cinematic and feels much more like a televised stage play, which is oddly reassuring for some audiences; (6) it features a closing twist, which I found infuriating rather than enlightening, but twists always drive word of mouth.

Have you seen any films in limited release that you're recommending to friends?

Holdovers ruled the box office as no one much cared about any of the movies that opened in wide release this weekend. Lexi Alexander's Punisher reboot turned out to be a huge mistake, opening to a fraction of what the original Jonathan Hensleigh/Thomas Jane version did four and a half years ago. $4 million is painful, though not terribly surprising -- the film was marketed as a totally generic action movie, with no stars and no draw except the Punisher trademark. (The most recognizable name in the cast is probably Wayne Knight.)

Even worse off was the Alan Rickman-starring caper comedy Nobel Son. Tossed into 900 screens by indie Freestyle Releasing, the movie grossed all of $371,000, or $415 per screen -- a foregone conclusion. I'm not sure why Freestyle shelled out the money for such a relatively wide release, or what they were hoping for. Maybe a pre-Christmas miracle.

The "winner" among the weekend's new wide releases would have to be Cadillac Records, which managed a respectable $3.5 million on under 700 screens. That was enough for 9th place, just behind Punisher (on 2500 screens).

Leading the holdovers was Four Christmases, which took first place for a second straight weekend; it will have a tough time breaking $100 million, but should squeak to around $95. Twilight bummed around second place, and should be at $150 million by next week. Bolt finally took a hit after its excellent second weekend over Thanksgiving, and should top out around $95 million as well.

The full chart after the jump.

Silly us X-Files fans trying to rationalize why The X-Files: I Want to Believe crashed and burned so badly this summer. It was too thoughtful! Too character-driven! Too focused on giving fans emotional closure, and not enough on slam-bang summer excitement! Long-time franchise producer Frank Spotnitz has a much easier and quicker answer: It was The Dark Knight's fault.

His theory goes thus: The X-Files opened a week after The Dark Knight broke all sorts of records and began its domination of the summer box office. What's more, the dark and brooding film was similar in tone to the caped juggernaut, and not the sort of counterprogramming that might nonetheless have had a chance in its wake. And so you get $21 million domestic.

Look, I'm probably as big a fan of I Want to Believe as you'll find around these parts; for fans of the show it was a lovely, moving conclusion. For fans of the show. The commercial problem with the film wasn't that it was too dark or that it followed The Dark Knight, but that it was too small, and its appeal too narrow. A bigger, flashier X-Files, with more explosions and flying saucers, would have done better, Batman notwithstanding. As it stood, people who didn't grow up on Mulder and Scully didn't see a reason to go. And -- speaking, again, as someone who loves the film -- they probably made the right choice. There wasn't much there for them.

Oh, and as to the possibility of another film that Spotnitz vaguely suggests: no thank you. This was a graceful, satisfying finale.

[via Movie City News]

After a couple of weeks off (I had a bad case of Twilight fever), Indie Winners returns with a look at the best-performing independent films at the box office this weekend. As Indie Spotlighter Eric D. Snider noted before the long holiday weekend began, precious few new releases have entered the marketplace recently, so let's focus on two that distinguished themselves financially.

1. Milk (Focus Features)
2. Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight)

Avoiding the fall festival circuit, and even drawing some criticism for not opening in time to possibly influence California's vote on Proposition 8, Gus Van Sant's Milk finally debuted to very strong numbers, earning $38,361 per screen (36) in 19 cities, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo. Milk opened last Wednesday and has been riding a wave of critical acclaim (93% positive, per Rotten Tomatoes, including our own James Rocchi). It will expand its theater count over the next couple of weeks.

In contrast, Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire followed the fall festival circuit, generated glowing early word, and continues to perform well in (slightly) expanded release in its third week, scoring a per-screen average of $27,898 at 49 locations. Slumdog Millionaire also has received extremely positive reviews (92% at Rotten Tomatoes) and is likewise inspiring good word of mouth.

The old, if not profound, lesson? Specialty audiences have been responding to intelligent films that resonate emotionally, ones that sound different from the usual art house fare. Stars like Sean Penn and Josh Brolin may snare some viewers, but I'd bet it's the rousing treatment of important (and pertinent) subjects that drives Milk to a solid success as it expands. Lacking recognizable stars, Slumdog Millionaire definitely is building momentum because of its underdog tale and looks primed to be a crossover success.

I think critics should start boycotting the yearly Christmas Family Comedy. It's amazing: these movies are never good. I can't think of another distinct subgenre with such a poor track record over the last decade. And of course, I went and saw Four Christmases, of my own free will. I'm an idiot.

In any event, it was silly of me to imply that Four Christmases didn't have the muscle to win the weekend; high-profile Christmas movies almost always do well. The $31.7 million three-day is one of the best openings ever for a movie of this kind; last year's Fred Claus, also starring Vince Vaughn, only managed $18.5 million in early November. Four Christmases even squeaked out Elf. Its five-day gross was an impressive $46.7 million.

Australia, on the other hand: oh boy. Baz Luhrmann's ultra-expensive, ultra-long epic made $20 million over the five days, which is less than inspiring -- especially considering it has now basically exited the Oscar race. Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! only ended up with around $57 million at the end of its domestic run -- but it didn't cost $130 million, either.

Transporter 3 -- the weekend's best new offering, for my money -- did okay with $12.3 million over three days and $18.5 over five. The three-day is a slight decline from what Transporter 2 did three years ago, but overall I'd put them even. This franchise continues to be profitable.

Twilight fell considerably, which isn't too surprising given the rabid-fan phenomenon that packs theaters opening weekend. Around $160 million is looking like the endgame. Meanwhile, Bolt, facing no new kid-centric competition over the weekend, held up almost miraculously well, actually gaining slightly over the three-day weekend. The folks at Disney have surely turned last weekend's frown upside down.

Slots 10 and 11 on the weekend's chart are occupied by limited releases: Milk and Slumdog Millionaire, on 36 and 49 screens, respectively. Their success bodes well for their Oscar chances.

The full five-day estimates after the jump.