box-office

Monday Afternoon Box Office: Special Labor Day Edition

mark · 09/06/04 04:52PM

Why are we bringing you the box office results instead of adding a day's worth of sun poisoning to the weekend's dose of alcohol poisoning? Have you been outside the last two days? If we'd wanted to spend the holiday baking in 102 degree heat, we would have gone to Phoenix.

The Projectionist: Summer Crash

mark · 08/20/04 01:57PM

Because the summer box office season is now officially over—this time we really mean it!—and the studios are opening three mediocre movies just for the the hell of it, projections are going to be a crapshoot. In the past, we've urged you to take these predictions to the bank; today, we recommend you try to sell them to the slow kid in front of the 7-11 who spends his day smashing a soda can with a jagged rock.

The Projectionist: Mr. Rough Trade Flirts With Number One

mark · 08/06/04 02:22PM

We reserve the right to be so eerily accurate in our predictions that you think a sophisticated computer model is at work—or to be so wrong that you think we compute our projections in crayon on the back of a cheap hooker.

The Projectionist: Feel Smart Watching The Village

mark · 07/30/04 02:32PM

Get off your convention watching asses and spend a politics-free weekend in the theater. That recommendation might be bad news for The Manchurian Candidate, but whatever. It's probably insured against a weak opening by the Kerry campaign.

Monday Box Office Special Edition: Catwoman In Perspective

mark · 07/26/04 04:15PM


To fully appreciate the performance of the film that Roger Ebert called "unbelievably bad" and "truly bad," resident statistician Andrew Krucoff puts Catwoman's box office numbers in historical perspective with his chart.In addition to finishing a distant third in its first weekend of release, it had only the fourth-best opening of any "cat" movie in recent history, and the competition isn't exactly fierce; Mike Myers' reviled The Cat in the Hat and Fox's Reagan-defiling Garfield both put Halle Berry's light S&M feline offering in a burlap sack and tossed it off a bridge.

The Projectionist: Next Year's July 4th Debuts

mark · 07/12/04 07:25PM

Variety anticpates a battle between Paramount and Fox over next year's Fourth of July weekend, when both Mission: Impossible 3 and Fantastic Four are scheduled to open. Defamer is up to the challenge of fearlessly predicting the outcome of this face-off, presuming that one of the studios doesn't pull their offering off the Independence Day picnic table and withdraw from Hollywood's biggest dick-measuring contest.