| Body of Lies: bring in the body bags! |
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| Posted on Monday, 13 October 2008 by Don |
If I were Russell Crowe or Leonardo DiCaprio, I'm not sure what I would find most humiliating this morning. Would it be that their lavish, elaborate thriller Body of Lies was beaten for first place in the US last weekend by the second outing of Beverly Hills Chihuahua? Or the fact that their film was also outgunned by Sony's low budget horror movie Quarantine? Maybe I'd just console myself with the big pay cheque, insist that I gave it my best shot and it's not my fault audiences showed yet again they're averse to movies dealing with the war on terror in the Middle East. Fantasy Moguls' Steve Mason summed up the national mood in the US when he said, "With the Dow down 18%, the biggest one-week drop in Wall Street history, ticket buyers are not necessarily looking for a complex, arcane, espionage thriller. With the country arguing over Presidential politics and life seeming very, very serious, a lot of people would rather see a funny movie about a dog in a purse." And so it was that Disney's Beverly Hills Chihuahua won the dogfight, taking $17.5 million (off 40%), upping its 10-day total to $52.5 million. Quarantine checked in with a better-than-expected $14.2 million; the Cloverfield-esque film about people trapped in an apartment complex, starring Jennifer Carpenter, launches here in December. Body of Lies captured $12.9 million, a shockingly mediocre start for a movie directed by Ridley Scott, boasting DiCaprio and Crowe in the leads, and with a reported budget of upwards of $70 million. The other wide openers in the US fared about as poorly as expected. The Express, a drama centring on the first African-American college football player to win the Heisman Trophy, kicked off with $4.5 million. City of Ember, a sci-fi family adventure set in an underground city, starring Bill Murray, Tim Robbins and Saoirse Ronan, surfaced with $3.1 million. |
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