Monday Morning Box Office: Nicolas Cage's Impeccable Taste In Comic Book Material Embraced By Moviegoing Masses
If the Founding Fathers whose lives we celebrate on this Presidents Day were still drawing breath, they'd want you to spend this entire Monday contemplating the box office numbers:
1. Ghost Rider—$44.5 million
Nicolas Cage vindicated! After decrying the elitist bias of highbrow film journal Entertainment Weekly, Cage has proven that even when working with esoteric pop-art material, he can still deliver an artistically pure performance with mass appeal. Even when the studio demanded cynical CGI shortcuts during shooting, the notoriously exacting actor stayed committed to Ghost Rider's Truth, demanding that no CGI be used for his first transformation from human to chopper-riding demon because "the kids will smell the Fake on this whole project if I don't actually douse my head in Jack Daniels and put a fucking match to my hair. Let me burn my face off just once and I promise we'll do better than $40 million when we open." The resulting production delays associated with Cage's massive reconstructive surgeries cost Sony untold millions and bloated the budget, but their trust in Cage's vision seems to have paid dividends.
2. Bridge to Terabithia—$22.075 million
Please remind us: Is this the one with the talking Jesus lion or the one with the kid who rides around on a dragon?
3. Norbit—$16.802 million
Even if Norbit winds up costing Eddie Murphy the Oscar (and it probably won't), he'll always have that Golden Globe. And really, all an actor needs to sustain him is the love of the buffet-attacking junket monkeys of the Hollywood Foreign Press.
4. Music and Lyrics—$14 million
At this point, Hugh Grant's career path is utterly unpredictable; for his next project, he could just as easily choose to star in a cloying comedic love story with Cameron Diaz or a lighthearted romantic farce with Kate Hudson.
5. Tyler Perry's Daddy's Little Girls—$12.1 million
6. Breach—$10.371 million
Hopefully, a $10 million opening will be good enough to get Ryan Phillippe off the party-hosting circuit.