Hollywood Deep

“30 Days of Night”, opening the week before, beat the Halloween horror flick traffic. The Sony fright flick, with Josh Hartnett leading Alaskans against ravenous vampires that turn up for the prolonged winter darkness, debuted as the weekend’s No. 1 movie with $16 million, according to studio estimates Sunday. Audiences continued to choose merriment over misery as the latest crop of sober Academy Awards hopefuls, among them Ben Affleck‘s “Gone Baby Gone,” Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal’s “Rendition” and Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro’s “Things We Lost in the Fire,” debuted with so-so to dismal numbers.

“Fall is the season of the serious movie, and it seems like audiences in a way are resisting the serious movie right now,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Media By Numbers. “Audiences are finding their horror or their intensity in real life, and they’re not looking for it in the movies.”

Further proof that movie fans want fun over adversity: A 3-D version of Disney’s Halloween perennial “Tim Burton’s the Nightmare Before Christmas” was No. 8 with $5.1 million and had a better rate of return per-theater than any of the new wide releases.

After a record breaking summer of audiences coming out in droves to see one big blockbuster movie after another, moviegoers are still choosing fun entertainment to spend their money on. Even though the more serious award caliber movies are being released week after week, the audiences are choosing the lighter fare available. From George Clooney to Mark Wahlberg, Ben Afleck, Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Halle Berry, Benicio Del Toro, Cate Blanchett, Sean Penn, Joaquin Phoenix, and other Academy Award veterans who are hopefulls again this year. The audiences so far has decided not to see their movies this year. The feeling is that their films are more serious, adult oriented, real life stories, the audiences opting for more “fun” movies. So mindless entertainment and fantasy movies have been cleaning up at the box office. Evidenced by the last month of box office, ‘The Game Plan” #1 for two weeks in a row, followed by “Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married?”, and last weekend’s c. The movies that headline the major movie stars are falling by the wayside week after week.

What it tells me is that people have enough to deal with in their lives. Working hard, paying bills, the war in Iraq, global warming, terror alerts, fires in Malibu, bad weather, the people want to be entertained. They want to escape, in an over the top fantasy story or comedy. Heavy stories are not the choice right now, people have not decided to see the films of this year yet, they are still going to the movies. One thing I do know however, is that come award time the names The Rock, Josh Hartnett, and Tyler Perry, will not be part of the discussion.

Weekend Box Office
1. “30 Days of Night,” $16 million.
2. “Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married?”, $12.1 million.
3. “The Game Plan,” $8.1 million.
4. “Michael Clayton,” $7.1 million.
5. “Gone Baby Gone,” $6 million

Full Box Office Chart

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