When I first reported on the high ‘Indiana Jones 4′ tracking numbers, I must say I wasn’t feeling it. And when some analysts said ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’ might do $50 million on Thursday alone, I thought well, I could be wrong. But as it turns out, those numbers were a little too optimistic. Early estimates indicate anywhere between $24-$27 million for Thursday alone.

Yesterday’s (Wednesday’s) early screenings were good for an estimated $4.5 million — the ones after midnight. Of course you can’t compare those diehard fans to the more casual crowd this weekend. So those midnight numbers don’t prove much. But now that the early Thursday numbers are in, we can conclude Indy 4 is off to a good start. Not record breaking yet, but it might still break some during the weekend.

More on Indy’s box office when new numbers come in.

UPDATE: the final figure is a little over $25 million, according to Paramount.

After the enormous box office success of ‘Spider-Man 3,’ you would expect Sony Pictures to be all over part 4. But while Sony paid Marvel to renew the rights, there’s an unpleasantly low amount of news on the picture. Marvel Vice Chairman Peter Cuneo says it’s all up to Sony. They’ll have nothing to do with the movie, since the series started before Marvel went on to produce its own movies.

Coneo said the “most likely scenario is 2010 or 2011 but we can’t speak for them and I think that we don’t know. They have given us their re-up payment for that film so you know they’re going to make it within a reasonable timeframe. Sony may be looking at some issues with the cast and so on, I think they have to make some decisions.“

You can tell he isn’t giving out all his facts. Is Sam Raimi really not going to direct ‘Spider-Man 4′? Is Tobey Maguire sick of playing Spidey? It can’t be the money. The last movie made $890 million worldwide, so Sony has enough to pay these guys a decent salary. But I’d say Jason Biggs makes for a good new nerdy Peter Parker. Just to freshen up the series a bit.

That’s what you get when you start remaking something you can’t just copy over to Hollywood. The original South Korean ‘My Sassy Girl’ was a wild success in its home country and became the highest grossing movie ever in 2001. The romance had a big cult following outside Korea too and where potential money is, a Hollywood remake is just around the corner.

But making the ‘mid-six figure deal’ didn’t turn out that well for Gold Circle Films. The movie will see a straight-to-DVD release August 26. Find out why after the jump. The fun and chemistry of the original is just nowhere to be found.

Continue reading ‘My Sassy Girl’ remake straight to DVD

CanMag has a bunch of new ‘Get Smart’ production stills. Small ones, but we’ll deal with it. The big budget Steve Carell vehicle will be in theaters June 20.

Richard Dreyfuss, who had his last big appearance in box office flop ‘Poseidon,’ will take the role of Dick Cheney in ‘W.,’ the George W. Bush biopic by Oliver Stone. Josh Brolin, the guy who takes the money in ‘No Country for Old Men,’ will play Bush, as seen in the cover below — don’t be afraid, you can click it.

The $30 million project will start shooting in Shreveport this month and is targeting an October release, just before the elections. The script is penned by Stanley Weiser, who also wrote the famous business movie ‘Wall Street’ for Oliver Stone. This is turning out to be an interesting cast. If the script is any good this could actually be worth it.

Normally we’d do a ‘upcoming weekend in quotes,’ but this week is all about ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.’ So how did the critics judge? Well, a Metacritic score of 6.7 certainly isn’t bad, but it’s not anything to be happy about either. Not that Harrison Ford will care, but a little movie called ‘Iron Man’ scored a much better 7.8.

Continue reading ‘Indiana Jones 4′ in quotes

Was Universal expecting ‘Iron Man’ to be this big? I don’t know. They probably didn’t think they were getting the second prize by buying the ‘The Incredible Hulk’ distribution rights, while Paramount bought ‘Iron Man.’ But now Universal is using ‘Iron Man’ to sell ‘The Incredible Hulk’ to their audience. People who are currently calling MovieTickets.com for ‘Iron Man’ tickets are receiving a paid advertising message.

The computer will ask the caller, “Like Tony Stark? See more of him in ‘Incredible Hulk’ in theaters on June 13. Press 1 to get a text message reminder…” If they do, they will get a SMS the day before ‘The Incredible Hulk’ opens. “We’ve done audio ads for ticketing sites in the past. This was a really cool opportunity to contextually target and serve the ad to a really relevant, hyper-targeted audience, and have the ability to re-target them,” Megan Crowell of advertising agency Ignited said.

Apptera, the company that implemented the message, said the campaign saw a 3% sign-up rate. “What the studio wants to do is get a big opening weekend, to have these time bombs, people carrying cell phones that start buzzing on opening day,” they said. So there you have it. Hollywood’s new way to target you, cell phones. Last month we saw a similar idea with the new Batman movie. Some people got a call about ‘The Dark Knight,’ with some questions about Harvey Dent.

Marvel plans to stay ‘faithful to the source material and completely traditional’ with their Captain America movie. ‘The First Avenger: Captain America’ will be a period piece taking place during World War II, just like the comic book, Marvel’s Kevin Feige said.

A couple of weeks ago, some websites claimed Matthew McConaughey was Marvel’s top choice for Captian America. While it would be pretty early to start casting for a movie released in during the summer of 2011 first of all, Feige says it’s simply not true. We all know how the internet works I guess.

Apparently some people would disagree if a say ‘Untraceable’ is not worth your popcorn. Sony Pictures’ $35 million crime thriller wasn’t a major success in theaters. It grossed $28 million domestically and managed to add another $22 million overseas. But it did make the number one spot in DVD sales last week, beating the $15 million ‘The Great Debaters’ with Denzel Washington and Forest Whitaker.

‘Untraceable’ came in second for rentals, doing $6.9 million. The $22 million Diane Keaton comedy ‘Mad Money’ came in first, with $7.3 million in rentals. The number one from last week, ‘P.S. I Love You,’ added another $5.9 million in rentals, making a total of $13.1 million. And lastly, the first ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ movie topped the Blu-ray chart, with ‘Untraceable’ coming in second. All those numbers are making me dizzy.