Things are still looking great for the whole Superbad crew, whose names you no doubt know by now. The raunchy teen comedy remained atop the box office for the second week in a row with $18 million, a modest 45% drop, for a $68 million total off just a $20 million budget. Exec producer Judd Apatow is a perfect example of what we here at moviegasm preach: keep your budgets low and attached to decent scripts that have a voice instead of being whitewashed for mass appeal.
But apparently the scales of Hollywood success must remain balanced, and it seems that the higher Apatow climbs in critical and commercial success, the lower the Weinsteins sink, as evidenced by the sixth place opening of The Nanny Diaries.
For the record, it brought in $7.8 million from 2,629 theatres for a $2.9k average. No budget reported, but on paper, I'm sure this looked like a sure-fire hit to Bob and Harvey. A best-selling book, cut from the same cultural cloth as the very successful The Devil Wears Prada, a hot young actress in Scarlett Johansson and the very talented Laura Linney as the evil yuppie (not to mention Paul Giamatti and songstress Alicia Keys in supporting roles). And on top of all that, critical darlings Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini- who did a marvelous job adapting Harvey Pekar's American Splendor comic books, as well as a terrific AMC doc about the industry called Hello, He Lied- on board to write and direct.
On paper, it looks like a sure thing.
The problems, as is often the case, are in the execution. Mostly, I think it reeks of 'been-there, done-that,' after Prada, which felt original and was a rare case of good counter-programming last summer. And this is just the latest in a string of critical and commercial failures for the once-mighty brothers, who, maybe ten years ago, were the picture of balancing artistic storytelling (through Harvey's Miramax) with commercial viability (through Bob's Dimension Films banner), all of it monitored by some of the shrewdest financial sense the industry has ever seen. Harvey in particular is famous for convincing big name actors to work for scale and winning the loyalty of some fantastically talented filmmakers, among them John Madden, Quentin Tarantino, and Anthony Minghella.
Now there's a flip side to that, and a number of filmmakers that want nothing to do with the man after their dealings with him (Billy Bob Thorton, for instance, swears that directing All The Pretty Horses for Miramax was such an awful experience that he'll never direct again, though it didn't stop him from staring in the newly-formed Weinstein Company's School for Scoundrels). However, for our purposes here, I'm not going to address side of the story. If you're interested, however, Peter Biskind wrote a very engaging book called Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film that's definitely worth a look.
And really, since the Weinsteins and Disney went their separate ways, the numbers speak for themselves (I'm only including domestic totals here, though with the exception of The Brothers Grimm, I assure you the foreign totals aren't any better): Who's Your Caddy- $5.5 million; Grindhouse- $25 million; Sicko- $24 million; The Last Legion- $5 million; Factory Girl- $1.6 million; Miss Potter- $2.9 million; School for Scoundrels- $17.8 million; Breaking and Entering- $930 thousand (!); Proof- $7.5 millon; An Unfinished Life- $8 million; The Great Raid- $10 million.
Even the more commercially-reliable genre films that were once Bob's domain (i.e., the Scream films) have floundered: Pulse- $20 million; Feast (of Project Greenlight fame, and not a bad movie, if unbelievably gross)- $56k; Venom$881k; The Brothers Grimm; $37 million. And that's just the last two years.
Many, if not most, of these also look good on paper. You've got high profile stars and Oscar winners like Thorton, Juliette Binoche, Renee Zellwigger, Anthony Hopkins and Gwenyth Paltrow, Robert Redford and Morgan Freeman. Not to mention Jude Law, Matt Damon, Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Ewan McGregor. The directors on that list include Tarantino and Rodriguez, Anthony Minghella, Terry Gilliam, Lasse Hallstrom, Michael Moore, John Madden, John Dahl.
