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...real Matt Damon didn't fare much better as the star of the new Green Zone: he went looking for the truth about Iraq's WMDs, and got blown up by the IED of public indifference. The box-office curse of movies about the U.S. Mess-o-potamian escapade remained unbroken, as Damon became the latest star - after George Clooney, Jamie Foxx, Tom Cruise, Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal, not to mention the South Park guys - whose attempt to address the blood and blunders in our Mideast wars tanked with the mass audience...
...Green Zone, reteaming Damon with Paul Greengrass, his director in the last two, very popular Jason Bourne films, earned just $14.5 million in its first three days at North American theaters, according to early studio estimates. That's way below industry predictions (in the low- to middle-$20 millions) and less than a quarter of the $62 million amassed this weekend by the defending champ, Alice in Wonderland, which has leapt like a White Rabbit past the $200 million mark in just 10 days. The Tim Burton-Johnny Depp effort is also a war movie, at least partly, but with...
...Green Zone was one of a quartet of new movies this weekend whose grosses fell into the modest-to-awful range. She's Out of Your League, a no-star, R-rated comedy about a schlub who unaccountably attracts the interest of a hottie, secured third place with $9.6 million. Just behind that, at $8.3 million, was the love story Remember Me, starring vampire swoon king Robert Pattinson; not nearly enough Twilight fans booked tickets on the young male dreamboat. The interracial Our Family Wedding, with America Ferrara and Forest Whitaker, earned $7.6 million to finish sixth (after the holdover...
...Green Zone, Damon plays a U.S. warrant officer who, just after the Iraq invasion, discovers that Saddam in fact had no weapons of mass destruction and fights to expose the dirty secret. No less than Inglourious Basterds, starring Damon's Ocean's Eleven buddy Brad Pitt, the film is a revisionist political fantasy disguised as gritty war reality. And given moviegoers' resistance to Iraq themes, Green Zone's trailers tried skirting the I word by making the picture seem like another Bourne adventure in all but name. There was no more hint of America's fatal foreign policy frustrations...
Universal, the studio that produced Green Zone, had smelled something bad for more than a year. Greengrass and Damon shot their picture during the last few months of the Bush Administration. Then, writes Anne Thompson on her IndieWire blog, the studio's co-chairmen, Marc Shmuger and David Linde, "pushed back the Green Zone postproduction and release to allow Greengrass to find the film - and an ending - in the editing room." The movie's budget was at least $130 million, plus another $100 million or so to bring to market, and is unlikely to return even half that...