Monday Morning Box Office: The Inspirational Tale Of A Sports Movie's Valiant Attempts To Recoup Disney's Huge Financial Investment
With so much to cover this morning, this is no time for tall tales about how I spent my one-day vacation. I'll say this about my absence, and no more: after five hours in a chair with a surgical laser trained on the most sensitive of areas, my "children" have been completely resurfaced. Beauty is pain. Exquisite pain. —Mark
Time for the weekly accounting of how much milk money the bully known as Hollywood was able to beat out of the 12-year-old weakling represented by the moviegoing public:
1. Invincible—$17.029 million
As in nearly all inspirational sports movies based on actual events, some massaging of the truth was necessary to make Invincible a more dramatically compelling product. Once focus group testing revealed that audiences would not be sufficiently uplifted by the real-life competitor on which Invincible was initially based, a spunky high school field hockey player from the Philly suburbs who wasn't immediately accepted by the catty upperclassmen on her team, the film's central character was changed to a gritty, macho, and unwaveringly self-confident Philadelphia Eagles walk-on. Strangely, Mark Wahlberg was also attached to play the plaid-skirted schoolgirl hero in the story's original incarnation.
2. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby—$8 million
Ever since seeing Talladega Nights on its opening weekend, we've been having nightmares in which a pale, chubby boogeyman in nothing but a pair of tighty-whities and a racing helmet chases us around a racetrack while shrieking about the phantom flames engulfing his jiggling form. The worst part, of course, is that just before we're about complete our signature on the papers optioning our fever dream to Sony for the mid-to-high six figures, we suddenly awake drenched in sweat, and, for reasons that aren't entirely clear to us, clutching a bag of Wonder Bread.
3. Little Miss Sunshine—$7.5 million
We easily prefer Fox Searchlight's earlier promotional efforts for Little Miss Sunshine, the Broken Down Yellow VW Bus Blocking Traffic on a Busy Street, to this crass attempt to capture the attention of people seriously considering buying both Team Jolie and Team Aniston t-shirts because they find their allegiances shifting on a daily basis.
4. Beerfest—$6.5 million
If the makers of Beerfest suspected that their happiest, most triumphant moment would come on the red carpet of their premiere, when Cloris Leachman clean-and-jerked a freshly kicked keg above her 80-year-old head, they might have savored the spectacle a little more, instead of just crassly shouting "Show us your tits!" at their star.
9. Snakes on a Plane—$5.86 million
We still think that Snakes on a Plane can be salvaged, even after a mind-boggling fall to ninth place in its second weekend of release. All that's required is another five days of reshoots to fill all the empty seats aboard South Pacific Air Flight 121 with Hawaiian Tropic bikini pageant contestants, setting up a breathtaking, eight-minute montage in which a seemingly unlimited supply of fake breasts are attacked by agitated, areola-seeking cobras.
