Weekend Box Office: Bangkok Mildly Threatening

Audiences, and apparently star Nicolas Cage, weren’t very excited about Bangkok Dangerous. 

The fall season limped into nonaction this first weekend after Labor Day, with Bangkok Dangerous earning a dreadful $7.8 million to take first place. The Nicolas Cage starrer was the only major new release this weekend. Obviously that “let’s make sure all the attention is on us alone” strategy didn’t work.

Summer holdover Tropic Thunders nearly beat Bangkok with $7.5 million. When final numbers come in on Monday, who knows? The Ben Stiller & Co. comedy may yet yet squeak into first. The Hollywood satire, btw, has now earned a total of $96.8 million, which means it has just about earned back its price tag. Awesome.

Number three was the steady performing House Bunny, with $5.9 million. The Dark Knight rolled on for fourth place, with $5.7 million. Traitor, with Don Cheadle and Guy Pearce, landed in fifth with $4.7 million (all numbers courtesy of Variety).

Expectations are always pretty low for the first fall weekend, but this weekend was 17% below last year. Variety suggests that the opening of the glorious NFL season was partially to blame, but considering the bulk of the games are played on Sunday, that doesn’t seem to be a good explanation. I mean, even I don’t spend Friday night and all day Saturday and Sunday fine tuning my fantasy teams. College football may be responsible for putting a dent in weekend movie going, but the real culprit–well, the real culprit after “no good new movies opening”–undoubtedly had to be the weather. it just poured on the US East Coast and South. No one wanted to go out in that kind of yucky weather. 

Next weekend is when the big stuff starts opening. Burn After Reading, the Coen brothers’ return to comedy opens in wide release on Friday–no slow arthouse rollout for Oscar winners! The early reviews from Venice were just dreadful. Now we’ll see if the Clooney and Pitt names are enough to spring the movie bad any bad pub.

The remake of The Women is also opening up next Friday. The trailer for that one looks just awful. I’m not even a big fan of the original, which is a startling admission from someone who will usually happily watch anything made in the 1930s. The first half is okay, but it gets bogged down as it goes along. It’s too long for a movie from that period, so I’m terrified of what kind of running length the 21st century version will have. Okay, I just checked IMDB and they’re listing it at 114 minutes which is considerably shorter than the 1939 original’s 133 minutes. Nevertheless, the cast assembled for the new one hardly stands up to the first cast and times have changed so much that I’m guessing the message of the original had to be changed in a way that probably just makes it a bunch of empowerment, self-actualization junk (not that the original had a great message, but it was of its time). Plus they probably just thought that the point of the movie was to highlight catfighting bitchiness amongst women. Great, because the world needs more lame stereotypes. I guess what I’m saying is that you won’t find me next Friday buying a ticket for the remake of The Women.