Director: Brad Bird
Running Time: 128 mins
Certificate: 12
Release Date: April 30th, 2012
Tom Cruise hasn’t had a great run recently. Mission: Impossible II in 2006 was his last bona fide hit, so it’s not surprising that he was keen to return to the franchise in the hope of keeping his star shining. What’s perhaps more surprising is that it works, as this well be the best Mission yet.
Ethan Hunt is called up for a new job – breaking into the heavily fortified Kremlin in order to retrieve some information. However after having failed to get what he went in there for, the building is destroyed in a devastating explosion. The agent quickly realises that he’s been set-up so that someone else could steal sensitive info from the Russians, destroy the building and then having everything blamed on Hunt and his team. The frame job has worked though, as the IMF is being shut down and Hunt and his crew disavowed. [Read more…]
Despite a critical drubbing and worries about franchise fatigue, Underworld Awakening has fought through to top the US box office in its first weekend, taking a respectable $25.4 million. That’s a little ahead on Underworld: Rise Of The Lycans, although that movie didn’t have Kate Beckinsale or a boost from premium price 3D ticket sales.
Although Martin Luther King Day is a four day weekend in the US, it isn’t one of the particularly big holidays for cinema-going. That said, the Mark Wahlberg starring Contraband did pretty well, scoring a $28.8 million debut to top the chart.
Paramount’s decision to set up a unit to make and purchase micro-budget genre movies for under a million dollars certainly seems to be paying off. They decided on the strategy following the success of Paranormal Activity, and with The Devil Inside it’s working far better than they expected.
If the studios were hoping for some four-day holiday New Year’s cheer at the box office, they didn’t get a huge amount, with Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol the only real bright spot. The overall box office was down over last New Year, but Ghost Protocol added another $38 million to take its total to $14 million in the US and $361 million worldwide. It’s a decent hit but not astounding.
The Christmas US box office is slightly unusual, as while it was a holiday four-day weekend, rather than releasing movie on a Friday, many of the studios decided to either release their movie early or wait until Christmas itself, largely because they now Christmas Eve always tends to be an unsually weak day (whereas Saturday is normally the best day of the week). The result is that while some of these new films movies got off to decent starts, they couldn’t beat out previously released flicks.
If Hollywood was hoping for a little pre-Christmas cheer, it didn’t get much over the weekend, after disappointing debuts for two movies there’d been high hopes for. Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows topped the chart with $40 million, more than $20 million down on the first movie’s take during Christmas 2009. It’s even lower than Tron: Legacy, which opened to weak reviews this weekend last year.
