Can ‘Black’ Buddies Beat One-Week Jinx?
Hollywood will be watching to see if “Men in Black II” can erase all memory of last summer’s one-week-wonder dilemma.
But with the Tom Hanks starrer “Road to Perdition” among four wide openers set for next weekend, Sony’s futuristic G-men face perhaps their toughest challenge yet in trying to repeat atop the box office heap in consecutive frames.
Yes, here we go again.
For 10 straight weekends last summer, no film finished No. 1 two weeks in a row after the Memorial Day opener “Pearl Harbor” managed that feat. Similarly this year, “The Sum of All Fears” finished first over the holiday frame and the next session, but no picture’s put together repeat winning performances since then.
The super-sized $90 million five-day opening for “MIB II” poses the tantalizing possibility that it won’t take until mid-August this year to find a movie strong enough to withstand the swelter of summer competition. After all, even a 50% fall-off from this weekend’s Friday-Sunday gross would yield “MIB II” a $27 million sophomore session.
On the other hand, Tom Hanks is, well, Tom Hanks.
“I would assume Tom Hanks will hold his own,” Sony marketing and distribution president Jeff Blake demurred when asked about the chances that “MIB II” will repeat at No. 1.
And in addition to the “Perdition” topliner’s unsurpassed marquee appeal, which also includes Paul Newman, there’s the added draw of Sam Mendes’ helming his first feature since his Oscar-winning feature debut “American Beauty” in 1999.
“Certainly (‘Perdition’) will be significant competition,” Blake said.
And the competition doesn’t stop there. Also bowing in wide release Friday are Disney’s video game spinoff “Reign of Fire,” MGM’s adaptation of cable TV’s wild animal show, “The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course;” and Dimension’s installment No. 8 in the “Halloween” horror franchise, “Halloween: Resurrection.”
Potentially working against a good second-week hold for “MIB II” would be its developing a case of “sequel-itis.” It’s a malady marking the offspring of an established movie franchise with a shorter life expectancy than the progenitor.
But some recent sequels have managed to shake the sequel-itis curse, including the picture that finally managed to break the one-week-wonder curse last summer. Universal’s “American Pie 2” bowed last Aug. 10 with a bigger opening weekend than the original comedy — at $45.1 million vs. $18.7 million. Its domestic run was longer-legged, too, at $143.8 million vs. $102.6 million.
Still, the same factors shaping last summer’s bout of box office one-week-wonders are once again in place this season.
Distributors are releasing pictures with print runs of unprecedented breadth. “MIB II” is playing on some 6,000 screens, meaning just about anybody who wanted to see the movie over its opening weekend was able to do so.
Also, summer 2002 is chockablock with major releases — perhaps even fuller than last summer’s crowded schedule.
So, as Nielsen EDI executive VP Dan Marks observed, “The new movies each week make it difficult to sustain a position at the top.”
Next weekend, Sony and the shades-wearing topliners from “MIB II” get to try.
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