New Movies In Theaters Sept 7th - Rotten Tomatoes
It is not going to be a big weekend at the box office. It is possible that no film will gross as much as $10M. The new releases appear to have narrowly missed going straight to video.
There are three films in general distribution, although they will appear in radically different numbers of theaters.
... The Words, a PG-13 romantic drama with some star power (Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Irons, Dennis Quaid, Olivia Wilde and Zoë Saldana), will make it into 2700 theaters and has the best chance to reach double figures. It should take the #1 spot, but probably with a modest gross in the $8-$9M range. Or it may not even finish #1. The reviews (27% positive) are not going to help. "A movie for people who buy their novels at Starbucks, made by people who write their novels at Starbucks."
... The Cold Light of Day will get into 1500 theaters, but will be hard-pressed even to sneak into the top ten. The PG-13 thriller appears to be a box office bomb in the making, despite the presence of some venerable stars (Sigourney Weaver and Bruce Willis) and new Superman. The reviews were not kind. Only 8% of them were positive, and the authors got to break out their thesauri in search of alternate ways to say "generic." If you're boning up for your SATs, note that some of their searches produced "shopworn," "by-the-numbers," "hackneyed," "predictable," and "pedestrian." It will probably gross $2-$3M. Willis and Weaver are probably the only reasons why this did not go directly to DVD.
... The presence of recognizable stars may explain the 1500 theaters for The Cold Light of Day, but it is still unclear how the third film got a theatrical release. The R-rated Branded "is a dark and mind-bending journey into a surreal, dystopian society where corporate brands have unleashed a monstrous global conspiracy to get inside our minds and keep the population disillusioned, dependent and passive." So it's basically They Live without Roddy Piper and his bubblegum. Branded stars Max von Sydow, as well as some other actors who might still be alive. (God bless ol' Max. He really did win that chess game with Death, didn't he? That game was 55 years ago.) This film has not been reviewed yet and will be in only 300 theaters, and only in the coveted "selected cities," so it has no real chance to break out financially. The R rating includes a warning about "sexual content," but there are no nude scenes that I know of. But then who knows? Nobody has seen the damned thing. If there is any nudity, let's hope it's Leelee Sobieski or Ingeborga Dapkunaite, and not Max or Jeffrey Tambour.
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