It just goes to
show you my memory isn’t what it used to be. According to X Men: Days of Future Past, during the 1973 Paris Peace Talks to end the Vietnam War, a naked blue chick with orange hair jumped out of a window and had a fight with a blue hairy half man/half beast. I
remember that the talks were more or less a failure, since, though there was some sort
of agreement, it didn’t end the war for at least another 2 years. But you would
think I would have remembered that monster and that naked chick.
Then, of
course, I remember President “Tricky Dick” Nixon
all too well, and Watergate, and his
resignation, and his “I’m not a crook,” and all that. But I’ll be damned that
somehow it slipped my mind that he also revealed to the world, at a White House
ceremony, an army of giant flying robots, resulting in all kinds of chaos and
pandemonium at the event, caused by some levitating guy wearing a cape and a helmet. So
thank God for X Men, or else, all these important events would have been lost to
faded memory.
So what does
this have to do with this weekend’s box office report? Nothing really. It’s just
something I wanted to get off my chest – all this playing around with history and stuff.
And of course
the film was no. 1 this weekend, making some $90.7 million, and is expected to do as
much as $110-$115 million during this Memorial Day extended weekend. And add to that the $171 million that the film has done overseas to date, and no doubt there’s a huge sigh of relief to Fox.
Relief, since the film, with its rumored $270
million production cost, makes it the second most expensive movie in Fox’s history, with 1997’s Titanic still at no. 1, with its $294 million budget (in 2014 dollars), and Avatar coming in third for Fox with a $237 million budget.
Meanwhile
have film-goers finally had it with Adam Sandler and his lousy, infantile
comedies? O.K. I get it. When he’s tried
to branch out and has done something different, such as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch
Drunk Love or Judd Apatow’s Funny People,
which are possibly his two best films, audiences didn’t respond.
But of late, his usual crappy stuff, such as That’s My Boy, have not fared well at all (with the exception of those Grown Ups movies). And now Blended (which critics are saying is
something of an improvement because it’s terrible, but not as terrible as the
stuff he’s been cranking out lately) can be added to his list of b.o. disappointments, with just $14 million this weekend.
Unless the film does better overseas – and none of Sandler’s films have done any
real business in foreign markets – you can chalk this one up as another loser for Sandler.
Last week’s No. 1 film Godzilla, dropped significantly as expected, but still did enough business to come in second with $34.8 million, and a total so far domestically of $148.8 million. Add another $103 million from overseas box office, although the film still has yet to be released in most of the world – particularly, Asia where it won’t open until later this year.
And Belle jumped up to 12th place, now playing on 453 screens, with a weekend total of $1.7 million; Though after Monday, that figure should be closer to around $2.5 million, which means a b.o. total to date of $3.9 million, will be closer to $5 million after the holiday weekend.