Word: caroled
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...Sunday morning in Hollywood, and the experts have declared the winners and losers of the weekend box office, for which the celebrity contenders were Jim Carrey in Disney's A Christmas Carol, George Clooney in The Men Who Stare at Goats and Cameron Diaz in The Box. Headline in The Wrap: "$31M Lump of Coal for 'Christmas Carol'." And from Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood: "Happy Holidays? Not for Stars: Carrey, Clooney, & Cameron Open Soft This Weekend." Meanwhile, Variety trumpeted that "'Precious' finds special place at box office...
...numbers - the studios' early tallies of the weekend gross, based on hard numbers for Friday, estimates for Saturday and sheer guesswork for Sunday - say that Christmas Carol won the weekend with $31 million, more than double the $14 million take of the runner-up, and last week's winner, Michael Jackson's This Is It. The very odd Clooney comedy came in third, with $13.3 million, just beating out the $12.9 million gleaned by the low-budget alien-abduction thriller The Fourth Kind. Trailing these were the unkillable phenomenon of Paranormal Activity, with $8.6 million in its seventh week...
...Christmas Carol cost a bundle, $200 million, and no doubt Disney would have liked a bigger start for their way-before-Christmas movie. But it registered the best first weekend of any Jim Carrey movie of the past five years in which he has been seen. (In the CGI-cartoon version of Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who, Carrey provided the elephant's voice.) And Goats opened stronger than any Clooney movie of this decade that didn't costar Brad Pitt. The Box certainly didn't measure up to recent Diaz openings, even middling ones. But, like Goats, it cost...
...Vegas sports book, there's a tiny bit of science in the numbers. The odds for a game or a race are determined by the recent finishes of teams or horses; the line-makers are predicting outcomes on past strengths and weaknesses. New movies, especially nonsequels like Christmas Carol, Goats and The Box, have no track record; they have only the expectations, high or low, of industry swamis. The Sunday-morning "weekend" numbers are also a guessing game, since the final tabulations don't come in until Monday afternoon. Declaring a weekend champ on Sunday is like saying...
...after Halloween, and with the spine-numbing pleasure of Paranormal Activity in many moviegoers' minds, The Fourth Kind benefitted from a beguilingly creepy ad campaign, giving glimpses of alien possession. Audiences didn't feel the same urgency, seven weeks before Christmas, to see the 467th version of A Christmas Carol, whose trailer emphasized hectic, hurtful chase scenes over the Scroogean character comedy and hearth-and-heart sentiment. As for Precious, $100,000 a screen is a feat accomplished only twice before (by Dreamgirls and Brokeback Mountain), but the movie had enormous promotion from executive producer Oprah Winfrey to complement...