WEEKEND REVIEW

 Not a pretty weekend at the box office.  Of course, Shrek continues to do no wrong.  But outside of that… yick.

Warner Bros. could have been pleased with an estimated $18.4 million start for Swordfish.  True, Gone in 60 Seconds started with $25.3 million last year on the same weekend.  But it was rated PG-13 and faced no new competition.   Swordfish had Evolution nipping at its tail… but it wasn’t.  Evolution came out of the gate lame, estimating only a $13.2 million start.  So suddenly, what should have been a slightly-better-than-acceptable start for the very high profile picture becomes slightly-less-than-thrilling. 

As for Evolution, it gives DreamWorks the two biggest surprises of the summer, Shrek to the positive and Evolution to the negative.  Make all the excuses you want, but Ivan Reitman and Tom Pollock’s company’s R-rated comedy Road Trip opened to $15.5 million last year… no stars, tiny budget.  Honestly, I am surprised, because it seemed to me that DreamWorks did an effective job marketing to kids.  Not good enough to convince mom and dad, I guess.

Pearl Harbor was the only movie that seems to have benefited from Evolution’s failure.  It got to stay in the Top Three, despite a 50 percent drop-off to $14.9 million… and that’s based on the estimate, which has been about $500,000 high in both of the film’s first 2 weekends.

THE GOOD:  Well, I guess that we are a step closer to finding out what happened at Sony in regards to the “David Manning” situation.  On Thursday night, the studio gave the story to Variety to run in its Friday edition.  Suspended without pay for 30 days each were Matthew Cramer, who’s been discredited with creating “Manning” in the first place and his boss, Josh Goldstine, Sr. VP of Creative Advertising, who was promoted to his position last November.  (The Reuters story is here)   I’m sure that Sony is hoping that this will close the subject for a while, but the move mostly opens the doors to a lot more questions.

Why didn’t The Hollywood Reporter or Inside.com do stories on the suspensions on Friday?  Could it be because Variety got there or was gotten there first?  Or is there more going on there?  And what other major outlets are about ready to add to the unhappy times at Columbia?

Was Josh Goldstine even in his job when the second “David Manning” quote ran in the Vertical Limit ads?  There is no question that he was not in his job when the first “Manning” quote ran with Hollow Man last summer.  Is Goldstine’s suspension because of his role as a supervisor or because of some earlier involvement with the situation?

Why wasn’t Matthew Cramer fired?  I’m not looking to make life any worse for this guy than it is, but this situation could not be any more embarrassing for a company that is well-known for prioritizing saving face.  They have been mocked across the globe.  “David Manning” has become a running gag amongst journalists, entertainment and otherwise, and will no doubt cause even more attention to be paid to the quote whore system that has become an industry standard.  And don’t forget the lawsuit.  Why is 30 days without pay being accepted internally as an acceptable punishment? 

That last question was kind of rhetorical.  It leads to the more serious question… who knew and when did they know it?  I’ve yet to speak to anyone at any other marketing department in town who believes that this kind of thing could happen without people all the way up and down the chain of command knowing that something funky was happening.  The explanation offered in the Variety story was, “According to advertising insiders at Sony, the publicity department would select favorable quotes for use in campaigns, then send the material on to advertising, without reviewing the final copy.  The situation allowed Cramer to introduce the phantom quotes, the source said.”  Uh, what does that mean?  If you think you know, read it again.  Publicity picked the possible quotes and then Cramer added a quote from someone that publicity hadn’t given them?  And the publicity department never noticed that?  Publicity may not have reviewed the final copy, but are we to believe that they never looked at the ad, even after it was running, and scratched their collective head and said, “Who is that?  Where did he come from?  That person has NEVER been on any of our lists, much less on our list of useable quotes!” 

Why is Variety calling John Horn “a Newsweek reporter” without mentioning his name?  Bush league.  (Actually, not bush league.  The practice of giving intentionally incomplete credit seems to be the standard at a lot of outlets these days for some reason.  So, major league… major league crap.) 

THE BAD:  Tom King is back from vacation at the Wall Street Journal and simplistic e-journalism at the paper that otherwise boasts the best reporting on the industry, in my opinion, is back with him.  This weekend’s Hollywood Journal column (available only in the paper’s Friday edition or by subscription on the web) King bravely takes on Pearl Harbor… after the rest of us have been on the case for weeks. 

Last week, I was bitching about Richard Natale being overly kind to Disney by writing that Pearl Harbor was ahead of Mission: Impossible 2 after ten days.  The manipulation there was that M:I2 was a Wednesday opening, so 10 days gave PH the advantage of a second full weekend and left out the second Saturday and Sunday for M:I2. 

Tom King decided to do an analysis of Pearl Harbor vs. M:I2 based on their 13-day totals.  Huh?  What do we think the significance is of 13 days in the life of a summer movie? 

In fact, M:I2 passed PH for the first time on Day Six and remained ahead on Day Seven and Eight, falling back behind as PH’s Day Nine, a Saturday to M:I2’s Thursday Day Nine.  M:I2 went ahead again on Day Eleven (Saturday) and will likely never fall behind the war drama again.  But all things considered… none of this really matters!!! 

The story is, as the story will remain, that by the end of the second weekend, Pearl Harbor was about $11 million behind Mission: Impossible 2.   At the end of three weekends, the different is around $14 million, based on the Disney estimate.  And that trend seems likely to continue, as Mission: Impossible’s third weekend fall-off was around 15 percent better than Pearl Harbor’s.  And with a movie that opens as big as these two did, that third weekend really tells the tale. 

But statistic absurdity was not the only issue that King botched.  The idea that Shrek has ANYTHING to do with the failure of Pearl Harbor is absurd.  Likewise, the idea that critics had anything to do with the bombing of Pearl Harbor is equally absurd.  This goes back to the old “Harry Knowles killed Batman & Robin” argument, which Harry himself has discounted.  Pearl Harbor is not an art film.  It opened to $75.1 million.  Word of mouth killed Pearl Harbor, not critics and not Shrek. 

King also gets the story of how deferred salaries and the $135 million - $140 million budget came to pass, somehow ignorant of the fact that Michael Eisner’s chafing over budget on PH started with the $200 million-plus budget and that deferments were the producer’s choice of how to deliver a movie for the money that Disney would pay.   And he completely misses the fact that Pearl Harbor is really on more than 6400 screens, limiting the significance of the 3-hour-long excuse for box office failure. 

Finally, in a front-loaded box office world, the traditional 50/50 split between exhibitors and studios is more tradition than reality.  In Pearl Harbor’s case, the movie has taken in more than two-thirds of what is likely to be its total domestic box office dollars before the split gets as good as 70/30, favoring the studio.  Anyway…

THE UGLY:  With all the drama around “David Manning,” studios aren’t exactly tightening up their use of quote whores.  Quite the opposite.  The funniest pull to me this week was on a former “David Manning” movie, The Animal, which replaced “Manning” with the L.A. Times’ second critic, Kevin Thomas, who is not a quote whore, but who is very, very friendly.  Thomas also provided the only useable quote in America for Pearl Harbor, which is now running.  (If you are interested in what the L.A. Times’ top critic, Ken Turan, has to say about PH, he did an “appreciation” of Jerry Bruckheimer that offers some hints.  Click here.  

But the one I can’t believe that studios are sticking with is Jeff Craig, the name that has become nothing other than a pseudonym for the phalanx of junketeers who stand in for the man who once worked the room. Right now, you can find his handiwork in ads for Swordfish and Moulin Rouge… two movies who don’t need the extra help.  Yet, there he is, one step removed from “David Manning.” 

GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY:  At the Film Forum in New York, they are offering up the American premiere of an Italian film from 1957 called The Wide Blue Road, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo.  The movie, starring Yves Montand as an Italian fisherman, is being championed by Jonathan Demme and Dustin Hoffman.  Gillo Pontecorvo is also the director of 1966’s The Battle of Algiers, which is well known here.  It will be at the Film Forum (filmforum.com) until June 19.

READER OF THE DAY:  No e-mail about the weekend’s movies… nothing.  At least not from people who saw the films.  And so, we re ROTD-free today.

E ME:  Come on… you can do it.  You can do it all night long.