This wasn’t the same movie I remembered.

First off, the kid’s name is Bastian. That may fly in Germany, but to me it sounds like the way a 4-year old would say Sebastian because they can’t be bothered to take the time and pronounce the whole thing. But I can. I’ll call him by his proper name, Sebastian.

So the movie starts with Sebastian drawing unicorns, playing with his fingers, and eating toast. His dad makes it a point to remind him that his mom is dead and he should stop being a little bitch about it. Then the dad proceeds to put a raw egg in his orange juice. He has to be aware of the dangers of E.coli and salmonella, right? The guy looks depressed and is clearly acting suicidal. That may explain his prickish behavior, but the way Sebastian reacts to the dead parent update, it doesn’t seem that way.

But things get better once he leaves the shadow of his dad, right? If being hunted down by a pack of prepubescent street thugs and getting tossed in a dumpster is better, than it certainly does! Or maybe that’s just the status quo for Sebastian, for after liberating himself from the dumpster, he’s again set upon by the street gang. There are apparently no adults around, or at least adults who care, to tell the ankle-biters to cut the shit out and get to school, so Sebastian takes refuge in the one place bullies would never go- a used book store.

Here is where we learn the only real twist in the movie: Sebastian is surprisingly well read! But the old fart that owns the book store tells him he’s not that well read, so in a classic “in your face” move Sebastian steals the only book in the book store that the old bastard likes to read. Now, I have an assignment for you, class. After you watch the movie, ask yourself what the hell the old guy was doing reading The NeverEnding Story? If he knew the nature of the book, then he’d certainly read it before. The people of the book needed a human child to save them, so was the old mothball just torturing them by keeping their world in a persistent state of peril?

Back to the movie. Or should I say crime spree, because after stealing the book, Sebastian promptly breaks into his school’s attic to take refuge from the manhunt which is probably underway. No cop, no matter how wily, is going to suspect a kid might hide out at a school. Once he’s properly surveyed the world’s scariest attic, Sebastian finally cracks the cover of his ill-gotten gains.

Do you know how I know the world of Fantasia is messed up? Because one the first characters we meet is a cannibal. Rock Biter, the giant creature made of rock, eats rocks. And they just show it! Crunching all these rocks like it’s just something normal, eating your own kind. I imagine if it was a giant horse named Pony Biter, then you might understand why I’m all up in arms about it. Rock cannibalism is just more tolerable, I guess. And there’s this short guy named Teeny Weeny. Seriously, did his parents not expect people to call him Teeny Weenie?

There’s also The Childlike Empress. She’s really old, but she looks like a little kid. I’m sure it’s hard for her to get a date since she looks like a little kid, which probably prompts most guys to stay away. Then the guys that would go for a little kid are put off by her maturity. Love life must be pretty rough for a child-like empress.

Fantasia is under attack by The Nothing. This Nothing is a scary wind, not to be confused the nihilists from The Big Lebowski who believe in nothing nor the terrifying wind from The Happening. The Childlike Empress sends this kid named Atreyu (bless you) on a quest to save Fantasia by finding a human child. That’s right, even though The Childlike Empress and Atreyu (bless you) both look very human they are in fact not human. So yes, The NeverEnding Story is about aliens trying to save their world from nothing.

Atreyu (bless you) sets out on his quest and the first thing he does is bore his horse to death. Then he gets covered in the boogers of a giant turtle. While all this is going on, a scary wolf named Gmork is tracking down Atreyu (bless you). Gmork seems especially cranky. He’s probably having problems at home with his wife Gmindy. Gmork finally catches up to Atreyu (bless you) and is ready to pounce, but this chuklehead dragon Falkor swoops in and whisks Atreyu (bless you) away.

For some reason Falkor drops Atreyu (bless you) off exactly 109 miles short of his destination. That stupid dragon was probably too busty yucking it up with himself to remember where he was going. No, busty was not a typo, it’s just that we’ve gotten to the sexy part of the movie and I’m getting all excited. In the next few minutes of the movie, Atreyu (bless you) has to walk between two sets of statues that have the biggest racks ever carved into stone. The second set of statues tell Atreyu (bless you) some junk, but I wasn’t really paying attention because their huge jugs were distracting me.

Atreyu (bless you) ends up in this cave with Gmork and while he is busy expositing, Atreyu (bless you) shanks his ass and Falkor is able to break away from his stand-up routine long enough to randomly save Atreyu (bless you) again while The Nothing blows Fantasia to bits.

It looks like all has been lost as Atreyu (bless you) rides Falkor through space amongst the broken bits of Fantasia, but they find The Childlike Empress still in her tower and she tells Atreyu (bless you) that even though everyone is dead and the planet is now chunks of rock floating in space, he still succeeded in his quest. The Childlike Empress’s whole plot was to get Sebastian (remember him) to read the book long enough that he starts hallucinating and thinks the book is talking to him. So The Childlike Empress and Sebastian sit down together and have themselves a little palaver, as Sebastian has now crossed over into the world of the book. Yes, you could say it was a very engrossing read.

The Childlike Empress tells Sebastian he can have as many wishes as his wishing ass can wish. First he wishes everything in Fantasia goes back to the way it was, out of the guilt he feels for being so thickheaded and not realizing he could have saved everyone earlier rather than have to resurrect them from the beyond. Once that is accomplished, his next wish is for the blood of his enemies. Sebastian and Falkor dive bomb the punks that tossed him into the dumpster. Revenge is best served from the back of flying dragon.

The moral of the movie: turn to a life of crime and all your wishes will come true.

Now that I’ve rewatched the movie, I can’t help but point out that there is another, sinister interpretation of events no one is talking about. You see, everything that happened after Sebastian entered that book store all happened inside his head. When the dusty old turd that owns the book store stepped out of the room to answer the phone, he really came right back in with a bottle of chloroform. He knocked out Sebastian and put him in his basement to become his sex slave. The Childlike Empress and Atreyu (bless you)? They’re fellow children abducted by the old man. Falkor the dragon? He’s an allegory for the heroin the kids were doped up with. The ending, flying into the sunset on Falkor? That’s Sebastian hoping for an overdose to relieve him from the nightmare he is now living. It’s not pretty, but that just might be what really happened. And as disturbing as that may be, this is more disturbing yet: to this very day, the theme song from The NeverEnding Story is still being played in grocery stores all across America.

But once it was over and I walked out of the theater, during that period of quiet reflection while your eyes adjust to the over-bright world outside, the movie didn’t seem quite as brilliant as it did scant moments before. The feeling just wouldn’t leave me, like that crap-cloud that hung around Pig-Pen from Peanuts. I spent several uneasy minutes trying to figure out what happened. Like the way you slowly recognize a friend you haven’t seen for twenty years, it eventually came to me. The Hangover was just another rip-off.

If the similarities don’t immediately strike you, I composed a table highlighting some of the most egregious points:

As you can see, from the basic premise (hungover guys trying to find what they lost) to the casting of Cleo King in almost the same role, The Hangover apes Dude, Where’s My Car at every turn. It’s not really arguable that The Hangover didn’t steal the basic plot. The best you could do is say that it was heavily influenced by Dude, Where’s My Car. You could be so bold as to call it an homage. Or you could be a buzzword-spouting dick and call it a reimagining.

It’s too bad that Dude, Where’s My Car had to have it’s good name shat upon by The Hangover. But it’s even worse that everyone, regrettably even me, handed over their hard-earned scratch to watch the same recycled garbage over again. I like funny movies. I like them more when I haven’t seen THE EXACT SAME DAMN MOVIE BEFORE. The Hangover is to me like those pair of shoes you wear when you step in a steamy dog turd- no matter how much you liked them before, now they’ll always have that stinky brown stigma on them.

I have this problem. I really like movies. Really I do. I love watching them and talking about them and thinking about them and reading about them. You know, I really like them. But I have this problem. For some stupid reason, and I know I should know better, I start looking at the business side of movies and it just sucks all the joy out of movies for me. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but once I start looking into budgets and box office and salaries and whatnot, I start fixating on them and then that’s all I see. Then it’s like the last thing I want to do is watch a movie. It never fails.

So I guess starting last June 3^rd, what I really needed to do was figure out how to start enjoying movies again. It wasn’t something I was consciously thinking about, but looking back I think that’s what it was. I didn’t have a plan in mind, but things started to change on or around the afternoon of July 7^th, 2009.

Ain't she cute

Long ago I made this vow to myself, kind of like in Orgazmo when Choda Boy vowed he wouldn’t do Hamster style any more. At some point I decided it just wasn’t important to me to go to a theater to see a movie.  Really, I just had no interest. Then on July 7^th I went on a bender of sorts. I went to the theater five times in three days. I saw Public Enemies, The Hangover, Year One, Bruno, and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. For me at least, Ice Age was by far the best of those movies. I can’t say I enjoyed the first two Ice Ages all that much, but the third one was gangbusters. It could have had something to do with Buck really reminding me of my ferret, Mugsy. She’s in heaven now, but I swear Buck must’ve been based on her. Had to be.

By the time those three days were up, I was kind of a drooling idiot from spending so much time in a dark room in front of a giant screen, but I think that started to heal some of the damage done by my Box Office Mojo subscription. Further repair was done in September when I rented [REC] and Inside. They were the first foreign movies I’d seen in a while and they were both very satisfying, for what they were. Then I watched Rambo and it’s like the money-centric demon inside me had been exorcised and I could just enjoy watching movies again. I made fun of The International’s name when it was released, but I was able to let it go and enjoy the movie. I didn’t find Adventureland too disagreeable. I even watched The Proposal and didn’t feel compelled to leave the room. I was back.

Now that I’m comfortable with movies again (I mean I sat through New Moon), I figured it’s time I should start writing about them again. Because I love them. I really do. Happy Anniversary.

Up easily made it to first place by about $44 million. Pixar’s tenth movie pulled in $68,108,790, about $7 million more than my prediction. Up also set the new standard for 3D openings, with just over $35 million coming from the extra-dimensional showings. It followed the recent weekly record-breaking trend and took the biggest 3D opening crown from 10-week old Monsters vs Aliens. I’m not exactly a slavish fan of everything Pixar does, but it’s heartwarming to see that the they’ve become so successful without always packing their movies full of quasi-celebrities and pop culture crap.

Even though Drag Me to Hell promised R-rated thrills to a PG-13 audience and had no competition in the horror genre, it only managed $15,825,480, well below my $23 million guess. It had extremely favorable reviews, an unmolested target audience, and a director whose last three movies have totaled nearly 2.5 billion worldwide, but for some reason it just couldn’t find much of an audience. It did okay, averaging $6,310 per theater, but it should have done better. Accounting for inflation, Drag Me to Hell didn’t even out-gross Raimi’s last pre-Spider-Man wide release, For Love of the Game, and barely made more than the 19-year old Darkman, which was in 800 fewer theaters.

Star Trek was the only previously released wide release to fall less than 45% from last week, dubiously making the cut at 44.9%. Terminator Salvation made just $16 million in it’s second weekend, for a $91 million total. It’s going to fall far short of it’s $200 million budget. Even though Angels & Demons isn’t exactly taking US audiences by storm, it’s kicking extreme amounts of ass in foreign markets ($105 million US, $252 million foreign).

The turd of the week was Battle for Terra, making $193 this weekend. That’s a 96% drop from last week. It made about $16 per theater per day. Does that even cover the power used to run the projector?

Up is the widest release this weekend, in 3,766 theaters. It’s also the tenth feature put out by Pixar, and their name has basically become the gold standard in computer animation. And they’re really trying to make a point that their name is bigger than the subject of whatever movie they put forth. Cars was about a car that got arrested and had to repave a road, Ratatouille was about a rat that wanted to be a chef, and WALL-E was about a robot cleaning up the garbage left behind on an Earth abandoned by humans. Those aren’t your usual topics for big-budget animated movies aimed at kids. Up is no different, about an old man that ties thousands of balloons to his house so he can float away and find adventure. But it’s a Pixar movie and as usual, it’s getting great reviews. Up should be number one this weekend, the only competition coming from last week’s Night at the Museum II, which is competing for the same audience. I think it’ll still manage to pull in around $61,492,540.

The other new wide release this weekend is Drag Me to Hell, and it’s a pretty thin affair-  some chick pisses off an old women and gets cursed in the process. It’s the first step back into horror for director Sam Raimi since Army of Darkness. Raimi’s been growing fat and lazy on the Spider-Man teat this century, so it’s nice to see him finally doing something different. He’s got a rare talent to balance disgust and amusement, gasp and guffaw. Over the years he’s seemed to have lost some of that. If you watch The Evil Dead and Spider-Man 3 back-to-back, it’s almost painful to see how much more generic he’s become. In the former you can really feel the filmmaking process- in the latter, you feel the budget meetings. Ingenuity was replaced with scale and the movies are worse for it. Drag Me to Hell is being touted as Raimi’s return to his roots and, like Up, is getting rave reviews (which easily makes this the best reviewed weekend in a long time). I’d say this movie would do really well at the box office, but I’m not sure there’s enough money to go around this weekend. I’m going to say it’ll make around $23,381,808, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it got closer to $30 million.

Night at the Museum II should wind up in second place, with Terminator Salvation likely edging out Drag Me to Hell for third. Star Trek and Angels & Demons should both still be somewhere in eight-digit numbers. There’s a chance we could see close to $200 million spent this weekend.

My history delving into movie numbers only goes back to last September, so I don’t have a long history of knowledge to draw from, but it seems to me that even since just last year, there’s been a noticeable increase in the importance of a movie having a big opening weekend. Sure, having a big opening weekend should always be the goal of a movie, but it takes several weeks for most movies to get near breaking even, that’s generally not even close after one weekend. It follows that of course the first weekend is important, but maximizing the box office of the entire theatrical run should be paramount.

But that isn’t the reality. In practice, as time has gone on, the opening weekend has become the sole focal point and anything after is icing on the cake. The picture in this post isn’t just a nice graphic to visually convey the topic, it’s actually the graph of the weekend totals for Watchmen.

The Holiday (Fall-ish) and Summer movie seasons are when the moneymaking movies are generally released, so we’ll look at those two periods over the years. For the Holiday season, during the 1980′s, the average decline from the first weekend to the second weekend was around 15.7%. In the 1990′s, that average increased to 24.1%. So far in the 2000′s, the average second weekend drop has increased to 31.2%. For the Summer season, the average decline has increased from 30.3% to 38.6% to 48.8%.

So what does that mean? Movies now are getting a higher percentage of their total gross from the opening weekend. They’re building up the hype to give them a big opening and hope some of it spills over into the next few weeks.

Looking at it another way, the percentage of a movie’s box office that comes from the opening weekend has increased over the years. In the 80′s it was 15.7%, 90′s was 21.5%, and the 2000′s is 33.1%. Nowadays a movie’s opening weekend represents twice as much of it’s box office as it did during the 80′s.

Out of the 100 biggest second weekend drops since 1982, three were from the 80′s, 35 from the 90′s, and 62 from the 2000′s.

Of the movies that have debuted in over 3,000 theaters since 1982, the one that has experienced the biggest drop in the second weekend was this year’s Friday the 13th, which dropped 80.4%. X-Men Origins: Wolverine comes in with the sixth biggest drop (69%) and Watchmen the tenth (67.7%). That’s three of the top ten movies that have seen the biggest second weekend drop, all from 2009. The oldest movie in the top 10 is Hulk from 2003. The oldest movie on the list of 58 was Pokeman from 1999.

Let’s take a look at Angels & Demons. It made $46 million it’s first weekend. Based on the averages, it might make around $24 million this weekend and $138 million overall. Using the 1980′s average (with an average 80′s ticket price of $3.41), a movie like A&D would have opened to $22 million, had a second weekend of $15 million, and a total of $140 million. The overall total is nearly identical, but the 80′s opening was less than half the 2009 opening.

There is even a trend developing where movies are relying more heavily on their opening day. The list of movie whose opening Friday represented the biggest percentage of their opening weekend is topped by Hannah Montana the Movie, only a month old. 53.9% of Hannah’s opening weekend came from Friday. Twilight is number two at 51.7%. Think about it: the two movies in the history of movies that have had their opening day represent the biggest portion of their opening weekend were released in the last six months. Four of the top five were released in the last seven months. 20 of the top 100 were released in the past year.

There have been more than 600 movies released into theaters each year since 2006. There aren’t enough screens to go around for everyone to have a nice long run, so studios gear everything toward the opening weekend and hope for the best. With so much resting on that one weekend, if it isn’t big, all hope is lost for the film being financially viable in the near future. Take a movie like Watchmen, with a $150 million budget and a $55 million opening weekend it looked good, but it cut it’s losses after 11 weeks and $107 at the box office, averaging $5.2 million per week after it’s first weekend. Those first three days of a movie’s release have become the most important in the entertainment industry.

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian plays the role of the family movie. The difference between this movie and the original is that it takes place in SURPRISE! the Smithsonian. Other than giving the museum more advertising than it’s ever had during it’s entire existence, I suppose all it really means is that there will be different exhibits to rankle Ben Stiller’s character, which is probably all people really want out of the movie: Ben Stiller overacting.

The first Night at the Museum made $250 million domestically. It opened to $30 million, but the second weekend shot up to almost $37 million. It’s pretty rare to see the second weekend bigger than the first, most likely the result of some great word of mouth. I’m not sure if it’s really the case, but there doesn’t seem to me to be a whole lot of buzz around the movie. Could it be that this was a one-shot idea and putting the same characters in a different museum sounds ridiculously contrived? What’s next, Adventures in the Museum of Modern Art? I’ll say the Smithsonian edition of Night at the Museum takes in around $49,600,469 this weekend, solid, but not spectacular. I still find it hard to see how the guys behind Reno 911! wrote both these movies.

It’s been six years since the last Terminator movie, but that’s probably not enough time for most people to get suped about another sequel. T3 had the biggest opening weekend of the series, but T2 had the biggest overall box office. I read that as people were excited for a sequel but less than thrilled with what they got. Terminator Salvation is going to change things up by moving to the future and giving us that back-story. There will be some people who are extremely geeked out to see that, but Joe Matinee might not be wetting himself over it. After all, this is another big-budget scifi movie, which have been showing up in droves lately. Eventually audiences will tire of it. I’m not sure about the long-term outlook for the movie, but I’ll say it goes for about $59,946,935 from Friday to Sunday. Too much competition from movies in the same genre right now for it to go higher.

Lastly we’ve got Dance Flick, and it’s relying like hell on the Wayans name. And really, that name is the only chance this movie has. Spoof movies have gone from silly to nigh-insufferable. Who saw Disaster Movie? Superhero Movie? Did you even know there was a Superhero Movie? The genre had been going a similar route at the end of the 1990′s with stuff like Mafia! and Plump Fiction flinging poo at your eyes. Then Scary Movie dropped in 2000 and reinvigorated the whole thing. That’s what Paramount is hoping will happen with Dance Flick, but this time they’re resting those hopes on the backs of the progeny of the folks that made Scary Movie, familiar sounding names like Damien Wayans and Damon Wayans Jr. But you can tell this just isn’t the same thing by reading the credits. There are characters such as Tracy Transfat, Uglisha, Ms. Cameltoe, and the whole Brady Bunch. This sounds all too similar to the same crap we’ve been getting since, well Date Movie, anyway. It makes me yearn for the days of Hot Shots!, or even Hot Shots! Part Deux. I think the familiar names behind the movie might get it to $9,517,788 this weekend.

Hasbro finally broke the board game radio silence, announcing they’re getting close to convincing Peter Berg to direct the movie adaptation of Battleship. Obviously, since there is no plot in the game, details on a possible story are nonexistent, unless saying they’ve going for an epic naval action adventure-y type of movie counts as plot details.

Berg is a passable enough director, but it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than his middling talent to craft an interesting story out of a game that’s basically a glorified version of Bingo. Jon and Erich Hoeber are going to have the primary duty in creating the story, seeing that they’ve signed on to write the screenplay. The brothers Hoeber are suddenly a hot commodity having written screenplays for four movies that are yet to be released. They did write one movie you may (or probably may not) have seen, Montana from 1998. Eleven years is a bit of a break after having just broken in.

What the Battleship name will lend to a story is anyone’s guess. B-4? Miss. D-7? Miss. A-9? Miss. I’m sure there’s a story there somewhere. Really, there’s even less to go on than the story behind Candy Land, and there is no story behind Candy Land.

If they really wanted to go all out with the movie, they would combine the capitalization of the Battleship name with a remake of The Battleship Potemkin, combining Hollywood’s fondness for pointless adaptations with it’s love of needless remakes. I could just imagine the Odessa Steps sequence in the new movie: soldiers marching down the steps firing into the crowd calling out Hit! or Miss!

Angels & Demons managed to hold off Star Trek and claim first place, pulling in $46,204,168. My prediction was only about $18 million high, but I’m not upset- it’s always good to get knocked down a peg after a string of successes. It was a little hard to know exactly what A&D was going to do because 1) The Da Vinci Code had a huge opening weekend and 2) it was the first big non-scifi movie in a couple weeks. Both of those factors made me think it could be a big weekend, but a lack of buzz and controversy hinted at an average weekend. Before I had adjusted my prediction, the calculated total was $42,741,461. Sometimes it’s best to have faith in the math.

Not being able to crack $50 million had to be a bit of a disappointment for Sony Pictures, but the movie also made $102 million overseas this weekend, for a grand total of $148 million, a hair short of the production budget. So even if the domestic totals disappoint, the movie is still going to make a lot of money.

Star Trek and it’s good word of mouth led to a $43 million weekend. That’s a drop of just 43% from last week, the smallest second week drop for a movie debuting at number one since Knowing back on March 27th. With a 10-day total of $147,645,384, Star Trek also has  the distinction of being the highest-grossing movie in the Star Trek pantheon, spanking Star Trek IV’s $109 million total.

Despite having a DVD release last Tuesday, Taken still managed almost $240,000 in theaters this weekend. It’s not a lot, but it works out to a per-theater average of $960 dollars, which is very respectable for a movie released all the way back on Super Bowl Weekend.

Monster vs Aliens had a fantastic weekend, dropping just over 2% from last week, actually averaging more per theater. Battle for Terra can seemingly do little right, managing to drop 79% this weekend for a $36,488 take. At least they can say it did better than Delgo.

At a recent panel on the future of filmmaking, CEO Michael Lynton said, “I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet. Period.” He further goes on to claim the Internet has “created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. It’s as if the stores on Madison Avenue were open 24 hours a day. They feel entitled. They say, ‘Give it to me now,’ and if you don’t give it to them for free, they’ll steal it.” This coming from the former President of AOL International.

Yes, yes, we all know that movie piracy is one of the biggest threats to the survival of planet Earth. Bajillions and cajillions of dollars of revenue are lost every year to the stupid, evil, disrespectful bastards on the Internet. Yeah, we already know about that. I’d imagine if someone in Hollywood took half a second to look away from the mirror they’re staring in, maybe they’d notice that there are other things in the world besides movies. And maybe, juuust maybe, a couple of those things might be beneficial to humanity. Certainly the worldwide dissemination of information and ability to collaborate in disparate locales are beneficial, and I’d imagine Hollywood relies on those two aspects of the Internet every damn day. But those studio execs would rather we go back to newspapers and telegraphs. That would get those pirates but good!

Anne Hathaway was also on the panel, likening blogs to the writing on bathroom walls.

For some reason occasional writer/director/producer Nora Ephron was there as well, echoing Lynton’s sentiments: “We’re in the last days of copyright, if you want to be grim about it… Stop it. I dare you.”

It’s terrible, all the destruction the Internet has wrought. But fret not, we’re the people hellbent on ruining our environment. I’m sure there are plenty of ways we can kill off one piddly little Internet. Obesessing over movie piracy might be a good place to start.