If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends..

Ok, let's talk film. Well the Wannabees are all gearing up today, getting ready for tomorrow nights unveiling of the Sex and The City movie and the girl night outs. Wannabee is a term coined to describe the groups of women planning a girls night on the town before or after the movie. These groups of women going out and acting like SATC stars. Yet they are pretending, they are wannabees cause no one can afford that lifestyle. But for one night many women will go out with their friends and be wannabees. Not there is anything wrong with that. It is just a counter name for the trekkie, geek, fanboy, etc names that these women give to fans of Star Wars and Star Trek. We give the name wannabee back to you. Anyway, you can feel the estrogen in the air - wannabee night- tomorrow night. If this was the opening of a Star Wars film, it would be fan boy night. Now it's wannabee night. We're just trying to be fair here. So, for once there will be far more females than males in the theaters on an opening weekend. I say tomorrow night will be a great night for single men to go out, for there will be plenty of women out at bars having Cosmos. Great night to be a single guy.

Sex and the City is set to break box office records. Insider reports many filmgoers have multiple viewings planned for opening weekend. So filmfans! Expect to see this film rise to one of the highest grossing films this summer. I am predicting a cool 130 million opening weekend. Sound crazy? Probably seeing that the biggest opening weekend for an R rated film ever is 91 million for Matrix Reloaded. I believe that SATC can beat that and become the biggest R rated opening ever. In fact it will! Mark my words! I predicted this! 130 million for three days is my very educated, astute guess. So, if you are a wannabee (SATC Fangirl)going to see the film this weekend, you better buy your tickets NOW. This film will be sold out and difficult to see.

Onto other news. Disney CEO Robert Iger is in tears of devastation that his Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian underperformed at the box office. He attributes the lack of success to the fact that the May 16th release date was "too competitive". Lets rewind shall we? The Chronicles of Narnia the first one, did 65 million in its opening weekend of the first week of Dec. 2005. The second weekend the receipts cut in half to 31 mil. Which is to be expected of ANY second opening weekend. Most of all box office reciepts drop 50% after opening weekend, it's very common. Yet, as Christmastime approaches, on the weekend of Dec 23rd it drops to 19 mil. But get this film fans, The first Narnia shoots back up to 31 mil after Christmas. It does another 25 the next weekend. In fact receipts don't die off until the first week of Jan where it still does a respectable 12 mil.



Prince Caspian, does 55 opening weekend then drops to 25 second weekend, then 22 the third. If you adjust the numbers there a little, you will see that it is making about the same amount of money the first one did. So what it Mr. Iger crying about? Well its not going to shoot back up to 31 mil like the First one did. Why? Because there is no Christmas. They ignored their perfect time slot. Mr. Iger got on a very high horse and expected it to do Lord of the Rings numbers of 100 mil opening weekend or more. Well Mr. Iger, there is no evidence to support those numbers! You had a solid run 2005 Christmas. Why would release it during the summer the weekend before Indiana Jones and two weeks before Sex and the City. What the hell were you thinking?

Somebody screwed up big time here. Someone, Mr. Iger screwed the pooch big time. It happened. No one can change it. They can't say, "Hey, maybe we should wait till Christmas, where our audience really is" Especially since its a Christmas film! I can guarantee you jobs are being lost over this.
Mr. Iger does place blame on The Water Horse, the loch ness monster/family movie that came out last Christmas 2007. He says that Disney was taking into account the "feelings" of Walden media's Water Horse and its Prince Caspian, not to mesh the two in a release date and steal business from one to the other. But, since when is Disney concerned with other studios feelings? Never.

Why doesn't Mr. Iger tell us the truth? HE and the ego manic execs saw the film and noticed it was better than the first and they wanted to go up against the big competition. That was it. And they failed. They had a built in market for Christmas time and they failed to return to it out of greed and a want to somehow disrupt the flow of Iron Man and Indiana Jones.
Mr. Iger took Narnia out of its built in Christmas time cradle and made a huge error in judgement.

That weekend Prince Caspian was Number one with only a 55 million. Two weeks before Iron Man made 98 million and a week later Indy 4 made 101 million. So the people are in the theaters, they just all didn't go see Narnia. Why? Because the first film was not that good. Majority of people who saw it didn't like it. That's it. You can't release a sequel to a mediocre film in the middle of two of the biggest blockbusters of the summer and expect it to kick butt. It won't. Especially when there is a built in Christmas audience. Disney screwed itself big. They have no one to blame but themselves.

Moving on!
So the Strangers looks genuinely frightening. It boasts about being a true story, yet I did some research on it and it is not a true story. At least not this version anyway. The names may have been changed to protect the innocent. A lot of films such as the Blair Witch Project say that they are real to make the horror seem more frightening. And for the most part, that does work. Truth is always scarier than fiction. Lets see what the reviews say.

Great piece on the net by Stacie Ponder, the Final Girl, on her blog, Final Girl. She talks about the scary factor when it comes to horror movie masks. Apparently the simpler, the better. I think that the scarecrow mask from Batman Begins was super creepy. Then again so is Cillian Murphy. Final Girl's link is above to the right.


Until tomorrow, let's talk film!