Update: Speed Racer Skids to Third Place Finish

Speed Racer tries to swerve out of third place…and fails.

This morning I wrote that Speed Racer’s ugly second place finish could get worse if the final numbers reveal that What Happens in Vegas actually had a higher weekend box office take. Well, consider the ugliness worsened: Variety reports that Speed Racer actually made $18.6 million this weekend as opposed to the Sunday estimate of $20.2 million. Meanwhile, final numbers for Vegas bumped their take up to $20.2 million.

Other studios apparently pointed out that Warner Brothers’ overestimate on Sunday morning of that day’s box office couldn’t have been by accident–anyone should have predicted that most moms weren’t going to ask to spend their special day watching Speed Racer (and it seems their kids weren’t trying too hard to talk them into it either). In other words, they mean that WB was purposefully pumping up the numbers just to make their big movie didn’t look quite as bad on Monday morning when most people pay attention to the box office race. Undoubtedly true, but as Variety noted, they’re hardly the first studio to engage in a little PR damage control by futzing around with box office numbers.

So what’s the end result of all this? You can stop planning for Speed Racer: Reloaded in summer 2010, if you were so inclined. And as for this year, well, now Warner Brothers has to hope even more for success from the likes of Get Smart, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, and of course The Dark Knight. Only the latter has real blockbuster potential, but it’s a lot to ask even as big a movie as this to try to make up for the Wachowski bust. Not happy times at the WB film unit, I guess.

Finally, what went wrong with Speed Racer? I didn’t see it (hey, movies in Manhattan are expensive–I’m not going to pay that kind of money to see a movie that I know sucks), but like everyone else, saw the trailer, read the synopsis, and read the reviews. The plot was stupid, but that hasn’t stopped movies with lots of action and effects from succeeding before. You know what really didn’t help, though? The movie was 2 hours 15 minutes. That is way, way, way too long for a movie aimed at kids. If they had kept it shorter and quicker, maybe it would have worked better–or at least been a little more tolerable. Wachowski boys, please hire a tough-minded editor for your next film.