Ridley Scott’s epic Crusades movie Kingdom Of Heaven is the number one film in America this week, beating House Of Wax into second place.
This isn’t too much of a shock – a spectacular film about armies and fighting and romance and clashes of religion beating a scary film about wax. But the real news is that a film managed to get to number one in the American box-office at the start of the summer season by only taking $20 million.
On the same weekend last year, Van Helsing (DVDs) took $52m. If you can’t remember, it was a sort of ‘Dracula-meets-Matrix’ bodge of a film. Nobody really liked it, and most people saw it as a box-office failure. And it took $32m more than Kingdom Of Heaven.
And exactly one year before that, X-Men 2 (DVDs) took $86m. And Spiderman (DVDs) came out at the same time one year before that. It took $115m. Which makes Kingdom Of Heaven look pretty silly.
There’s the obvious argument that a historical picture could stand
no chance against huge superhero films like the ones listed above. And
historical epics don’t have the power that they used to. Troy was a load of old man’s pants and Alexander was a bigger mess than the pavement outside a kebab shop on Sunday morning.
Could it be that people are downloading movies at home so they can
be disappointed for free, instead of being £7 down, and ending up with
the inevitable sugar headache from drinking all the fizzy crap they
sell at cinemas?
Or maybe (whisper it) the film’s just aren’t very good. The main selling point of House Of Wax, apart from all that frightening wax, was that Paris Hilton (DVDs)
did a little striptease. Every single schoolboy in the world has seen
her with a man’s dingdong in her mouth. A striptease isn’t news.
The box-office droop is likely to be stopped next weekend, because the new Star Wars (DVDs) flick will be out, and George Lucas has done a good enough job of persuading everyone that it will be The! Most! Important! Film! Ever! And then there’s the new Batman (DVDs) film and, best of all, Tim Burton‘s Willy Wonka (DVDs) remake.
So it’s not all bad news. Plus, that Ashton Kutcher (DVDs) film where he hilariously visits his side-splitting black in-laws has already come out. So the only way is up, as Yaz (CDs) once said.
[story by Stuart Heritage]
Anonymous says
Interesting!!!