So, now that Iron Man debuted to a $100 million opening weekend AND Grand Theft Auto 4 opened to $500 million in first week sales, maybe (just maybe) it's time for Hollywood to stop blaming poor ticket sales on video games.

If you make a good movie, that people want to see, it doesn't matter whether Halo 17 comes out that week or not.

Just a thought.

"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain," Harvey Dent.

Hmmm....

...about the insanity that we've created: with Iron Man opening to $100.8 million this weekend, it has now become possible to break $100 million in your opening weekend, and yet still NOT be in the top 10 of all time best opening weekends.  In fact, Iron Man will most definitely fall out of the top ten in just a few weeks, when Indiana Jones 4 opens.

It feels like we need to track box office differently now, and I'll use a sports analogy.  In baseball today, there's a complaint that the small markets can't even hope to compete with the larger ones, especially since there's no salary cap in baseball, unlike basketball or football.  Some are even saying that it's so unfair, that to maintain competition, the league should be split in two: one for the Yankees, Mets, and Red Sox of the world, and another for the small market Twins, Royals, and Brewers, etc.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, and I've written and re-written and deleted some ideas a few times now in this entry, but it feels like there's a level of "fairness" that isn't being addressed in regular box office tracking.

What does it mean when a film in just 3 days can (hypothetically) gross more than all the Best Picture nominations combined through their entire runs, but still can't break into the top 10?  I don't know...

I have to noodle on this a bit.

I had seen this floating around over the last few days but avoided watching it for some reason until today.  Now, I'm sorry I waited because I'm blown away by the comparison.  Seriously...watch this.  It's worth it:

Aaron, I say this with all the love, admiration, and respect in the world.

Tina Fey's latest film, Baby Mama, starring Amy Poehler, made $18.3 million in its opening weekend to place at #1.

Aaron Sorkin's latest project, Charlie Wilson's War, starring some people named Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, and getting promoted on some show called Oprah... opened to $15.9 million in a four-day-holiday weekend, behind some chipmunks.

Hoo boy... Tina's still got the quote of the (last) year: "I hear Aaron Sorkin is in Los Angeles wearing the same dress - but longer, and not funny."

It seems like just yesterday when I assessed that Hancock might be Will Smith's first true box office disappointment (I'm ignoring Wild Wild West for some reason), but this was based on the trailers that I had seen up to that point.

The karmic nature of the universe is obviously getting even as a new trailer was released, and (whoa!) this is a whole different ball of kick ass.  It starts out pretty much the same, but then by fleshing out the story more (he goes to jail as part of a publicity stunt to repair his image), and then a 3rd act where he doesn't even know how to be a stereotypical comic book hero (even though he's trying too hard), they hooked me. 

Suddenly, I went from "meh" to "holycrapican'twait!!!"

But I'm fickle like that.

• I don't love Noah's writing, but his Summer Movie Preview is pretty complete, if nothing else.  I find myself looking forward to Iron Man, Speed Racer, Indiana Jones, Get Smart (why open this on the same day as another huge comedy, The Love Guru?), Wall-E, Wanted, Hancock (could be Will Smith's first misfire in some time), The Dark Knight, Step Brothers, The X-Files sequel, Choke, Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder, The International, Towelhead, Hamlet 2, and finally, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (no, not really).
• David Poland handicaps and predicts the box office of the summer hits.  If Hancock hits $250 million, I'll be stunned.  Also, I think he's underestimating the geek quotient on Wanted.  I mean, if 300 can hit a massive opening weekend, then don't you think Wanted will gross more than $62 million all up?  Finally, if Sex and the City only makes $60 million, someone's getting fired at New Line Cinema.  Oh, wait - nevermind.  See David's full box office chart here.
• Dilbert author Scott Adams hated No Country for Old Men and proposes a new system for reviewing movies.
• The first full-length movie has been launched on YouTube, and the creators have an interesting business model behind it.  And by interesting, I mean "no way in hell will this work."
• David Poland again, talking about the Juno Blu-ray DVD.  It comes with a "bonus digital copy" that you can put on your iPod, PC, etc, etc.  This is brilliant, and I'd love to see every DVD come with this.  I mean, if I buy the DVD, and I want to put it on a different platform - can the studios save me some frustration and do the extra work for me?  I don't want to go find special ripping software, potentially breaking several laws... I want to put 17 Curious George episodes on my laptop or iPod for the airplane trip with my kids, but there's no convenient way to do this today.

Unfortunately, I couldn't have been less impressed by the new teaser for The Spirit.  The visuals don't seem to bring anything new to the table, using what seems to be exactly the same technology that Sin City used, and the music... well, didn't anyone else see The Untouchables?

I mean, I understand that movie is now (gasp) over 20 years old, but as someone who has seen it no less than a dozen times throughout my life, that music absolutely cannot be used anywhere else.  And in this trailer, it was incredibly distracting, to say the least.

How is this not a headline from The Onion?  How soon can I move to Canada?

Everyone has blogged about this already, but I felt bad not having done so given how perfect it is.  This satirizes so many aspects of the movie and Internet community, I don't even know where to start...

Did you hear?  They're gonna make a movie based on that cool Iron Man trailer?  Wow, I sure hope those studio suits don't screw this up...

Wildly Popular 'Iron Man' Trailer To Be Adapted Into Full-Length Film

As you may have heard, there's lots of fear excitement in various entertainment industries about the fact that the film Iron Man is opening the same weekend that the video game Grand Theft Auto IV is released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Nikki Finke says that the video game will hurt Iron Man's ticket sales, and Variety is reporting that GTA IV may pull in as much as $400 million in its opening week.  Nikki also brings in a 3rd party to discuss whether video games are bigger than movies.  He basically says that the numbers are bigger in video games, but that's because the games are almost 10 times more expensive.  I say, "money is money."  If studios could sell movie tickets for $60 a pop, they would.  But yes, there are fewer people buying video games than movie tickets - tell it to the shareholders.

There were similar rumblings a few months ago, when Halo 3 supposedly hurt the box office take of Ben Stiller's The Heartbreak Kid, but I still believe that (oh, I don't know) the movie wasn't really interesting to anyone and was destined to fail anyway.  Besides, is the core Halo 3 audience really the same people going to a Ben Stiller romantic comedy?  I'm just sayin'.

You know what I predict for that weekend?  With a huge comic book movie and a giant video game being released?  Well, just look at the title...

Hey, guess what?  Movie studios don't put women in lead roles!

There were about 110 movies with a male lead and 5 with a female lead. Of the second-billed females, nearly all are written as love interests of the first-billed man. There were over sixty movies in the sample with two male stars top-billed. The only movies with two top-billed female roles, on the other hand, were The Devil Wears Prada and Scary Movie 4.

Just a few links to enjoy:

• There may never, ever be a better movie poster than this:
• Film School in Three Lines or Less - Thank you McSweeney!
• Quote of the day from The New York Times, "Edward is very passionate. He is as passionate about the Hulk as we are." (For those unaccustomed to Hollywood speak, "very passionate" roughly translates to a seven on the "he’s a difficult person" scale.)"
• Random, but you have to listen to the Artie Lange meltdown on Howard Stern.  Take 30 minutes, and enjoy the insanity.

I'm pretty sure I wrote about this about 27 years ago, and that's usually a bad sign.  Nevertheless, after seeing the trailer today, I still desperately want me some more of this "definitely not a sequel to Grosse Pointe Blank, nope, never."

I don't know how to say this... but from all I've seen in the past, I know that deep down, the Internet is a warm, caring, loving place.  This is a safe haven for me to admit something, right?  Of course it is.  Here goes...

I laughed at this trailer for Meet Dave.

Multiple times.

I don't know why it happened.  Instinct, I guess, more than anything else.  I think I need an intervention.  Is there a place I can go to rehab my sense of humor?  My sense of taste and class?  Does anyone have any advice for me?  A 12 step program perhaps?

Please know that I do hate myself for this, but out of respect for you, my faithful readers, I had to be honest.  I trust that you'll understand.

Craig Bierko was literally on a rerun of Sex and the City last night, including his naked ADD banjo playing, and yet this morning, I get this:

I don't have words...

I'm going to keep this short, and maybe it's because the lack of quality, scripted television due to the writers strike has left me a desperate man in the desert grasping for drops of water, but...

What a phenomenal television show.

My only clue that something was up last night, was when Jin's phone got run over by the car.  I thought to myself, "huh... that's a crappy cell phone," but then that was it.  I didn't see it coming until the big reveal.

The other nice part was that the writers all knew that their audience expected to see Michael again, so they pulled a different rug out from beneath us. 

Kudos.  So good.

I've ranted enough about Funny Games, and I feel wrong giving it any more attention, but I saw an interview with Michael Pitt over at New York Magazine's Vulture blog, and this section jumped out at me, probably because it's precisely how I feel when reading about the film or seeing the trailers:

When we saw [Funny Games], we have to admit that we felt like we were going to throw up the entire time.
Yeah. It’s a really hard film to watch. I find that parents in particular have a really difficult time to watch it, which is understandable. For Tim [Roth], especially, making the film was really difficult. He’s got a little boy about that age.

Also, over at Hollywood Elsewhere, Jeff Wells is very conflicted.  He says:

Michael Haneke's Funny Games is simultaneously the ugliest and most repulsive violent melodrama I've ever seen (including the thoroughly disgusting I Spit On Your Grave) and the smartest and nerviest critique of sexy-violent movies in the bang-flash vein of Quentin Tarantino, Tony Scott, Oliver Stone, Eli Roth and other purveyors and marketers of homicidal style.

A fair percentage of those brave enough to see this Warner Independent release this weekend are going to walk out on it -- trust me. It's a hateful and infuriating film, no question, and yet it has a worthwhile point. And you can't not respect Haneke for this.

It's certainly one of the ballsiest movies ever released by Warner Bros. (technically Warner Independent) in its 90 year history. I mean this in a sense that average people might come out of showings feeling enormous hate for Warner Bros. for having done so. Seriously. If the final effect wasn't so stunning and dispiriting I could imagine people beating up ushers on the way out.

I actually commented on his site (something I almost never do... what is this film doing to me?!?!) with, "I have no desire to watch a young boy tortured for two hours, and I have no desire to see that boy watch his parents get tortured either.  Maybe it's because I have two young sons, but if that makes me a film wuss, so be it."

Bob Iger spoke yesterday about a range of topics, including Disney's purchase of Pixar in January 2006... that $7.2 billion purchase.

"No, we didn't overpay," he said, in response to a question. "It was clearly fully priced," he added, jokingly. "Maybe that's a euphemism.

Can we all agree that buying Pixar for the innovation-less Disney was completely, totally, unambiguously worth it?  It put Steve Jobs on their board, made gabillions in merchandising from Cars alone, (he even announced rolling out a MMO video game environment based on the Cars universe), and the stock is up 9 points since he took over. 

Oh, and Pixar happens to make incredible movies.  Not only do they have a deal for Toy Story 3, but here's the newest Wall-E trailer.  Can't wait.

He also discussed something else that caught a few eyes around the industry.

Iger said that since hooking up with Apple's iTunes a year and a half ago, consumers have downloaded 40 million-50 million episodes of Disney-generated TV shows and 4 million movies.

Now, most journalists just say, "whoa... those are big numbers," and leave it at that.  I like to call that lazy journalism.  Silicon Alley Insider, however, decided to do some homework... and I quote:

• Pali Research's Rich Greenfield estimates that Disney (DIS) is getting about $14.50 for each movie sold through Apple (AAPL). 4 million x $14.50 = $58 million.
• We estimate that Disney gets about $1.44 for each video it sells. 45 million x $1.44 = $64.8 million
• Grand total: $122.8 million: In other words, a little less than 10% of the $1 billion digital revenue goal Iger has laid out for his company this year -- and a rounding error for a company that generated $35 billion in sales last year.

Now... $123 million is truly nothing for a company of Disney's size, but it is all incremental revenue, as SAI reports.  The net is that digital sales of TV and movies aren't going to be moneymakers anytime soon.  I am curious though... how much does a Comcast make from VOD sales?  Is it dramatically more than this... or generally on par?

Yesterday, the internets brought us the new trailers for two potential franchises, Speed Racer and The Incredible Hulk.

I don't know what to think about the Hulk.  Ed Norton always, always does powerful work, and as you know I'm a big fan of putting "real" actors into superhero roles (Christian Bale, Robert Downey Jr.).  But this trailer really didn't bring anything terribly interesting to the table.  There are lots of reports of trouble in the editing suite on this one, and anyone who is surprised by this hasn't been reading about Norton's involvement on past films.  I'm gonna wait for the next trailer before raising my expectations.

As for Speed Racer, I just think it looks unbelievable.  Yes, it's cartoony and video gamish, but that's exactly what they're going for, albeit in an incredibly fresh, creative way.  Just awesome stuff.