Tagged: 2012

Amanda Peet confirmed for How I Met Your Mother

Amanda Peet, one star who certainly doesn’t need any immediate services of a Plano dentist at the moment, and who is one of the stars of 2012, last week’s box-office-topping disaster film that sank to a distant third place behind New Moon this weekend, has been confirmed as a guest star on How I Met Your Mother this season; her episode is scheduled for January.

Those blessed with long-term memory will recall that Peet got her start on the small screen, initially on The CW’s Jack and Jill series, and more prominently (and disastrously) three years ago on NBC’s ill-fated Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip.

While the guest appearance is a one-shot, Peet’s career has always had TV ties, even though she has fared better in her big-screen efforts overall.

New Moon shatters records!

Stephanie Meyer’s cell phones are probably full of voicemails containing well-wishes tonight; the movie based on book two of her young adult vampire romance, New Moon, part of her four-book Twilight Saga series, shattered box office records this past weekend. The film’s domestic take was $140.7 million, but add to that total an additional $118.1 million from foreign markets and you get an opening three-day total of a whopping $258.8 million in early box office estimates.

The opening shatters all November opening weekend records, and ranks the film as the third-strongest opening weekend of all time, right behind The Dark Knight and Spider-Man 3. Considering that the original Twilight grossed a mere $180 million or so domestically in a 13-week run last year at this time, this strong opening almost guarantees New Moon will outpace Twilight by a dramatic degree.

Book 3 of the Twilight Saga, Eclipse, is scheduled to hit theatres already on June 30, 2010, a mere seven months from now; the impending Thanksgiving 2010 release of part one of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows scared Summit Entertainment away from maintaining its traditional Thanksgiving release schedule, but since no other major movie is currently scheduled for June 30, 2010, the scheduling of Eclipse for that weekend, along with the strong performance of New Moon, virtually guarantees that no serious challengers will emerge on the same weekend, as well as allowing plenty of spacing between the Twilight Saga and Harry Potter franchise releases, which tend to draw on the same core audience.

Sandra Bullock’s football dramedy, The Blind Side, also opened strong, though admittedly well behind New Moon; the flick drew $34.5 million in its opening bow to secure second place, well ahead of last week’s box office champion, 2012, which dropped to a distant third, drawing $26.5 million in its second week of release, a dramatic falloff of 60 percent from its first weekend. 2012 seems to be aching from poor word-of-mouth syndrome, with the typical line being, “Great special effects, stupid story.” Add in some “oh what b.s.” moments in the action sequences and you have a classic scenario for a fall from grace.

2012′s domestic total is a mere $108 million at this point, but has done dramatically better in foreign markets, where it has already grossed $341 million to date. That should help producers with the $200 million budget, but clearly the film will not do anywhere near as well domestically as Roland Emmerich’s other major releases, such as Independence Day and, more notably, a similarly-theme Day After Tomorrow.

In all, six movies this weekend grossed at least $10 million, and the top 12 grossing films combined for an impressive weekend box office total of $248.6 million, nearly twice that of last weekend’s take, and we’re still not to Thanksgiving weekend yet, traditionally the largest-grossing weekend of November.

Yet with the only remaining major releases being the videogame-inspired action flick, Ninja Assassin, and the John Travolta-Robin Williams buddy comedy Old Dogs, it’s unlikely the top three spots in the box office total will be threatened by any of the newcomers.

The next film with major expectations attached to it won’t hit theatres until December 18, when James Cameron’s Avatar is due to hit theatres.

2012 rides world’s end to top of box office!

Overall box office for the Top 12 films rose 22 percent to over $130 million this weekend as end-of-the-world disaster flick 2012 hit theaters like, well… the end of the world. Claiming nearly half of all Top 12 box office receipts, the ridiculously over-the-top flick hauled in an estimated $65 million in its first three days of release.

That left the nearest contender, the animated Disney’s A Christmas Carol, with a distant but respectable second place with $22.3 million, although after being in release for 10 days, Disney’s A Christmas Carol still hasn’t made quite as much as 2012 did in three days.

Nothing else was close; let’s just leave it at that. The real question is how word-of-mouth about 2012′s numerous “BS” moments of inexplicable survival by the main cast will slow the film’s momentum down enough to stand tall next week against what is expected to be extremely respectable competition from The Twilight Saga: New Moon, a follow-up to last Thanksgiving’s vampire romance. The debris from that battle could leave a lot of people ready for their Myrtle Beach vacation rentals!

2012 heads up otherwise weak upcoming weekend

In terms of forthcoming new releases this weekend, there’s not a lot to look forward to, other than the ridiculously over-the-top disaster movie, 2012, by director Roland Emmerich. If anything like this movie ever happened, insurance marketing would collapse, but we’d all be dead so who cares, right?

Granted, the special effects are custom-built for the big screen and it’ll even look good on 1080p HDTV sets, but the whole escape from LA sequence is just too ridiculous for words. How can everyone but ONE GUY be getting killed when the destruction is that close behind him? Just not credible… kinda like the global warming theory Emmerich’s previous flick, DAY AFTER TOMORROW, was built around.