The summer box office season is now officially over.
With a handful of mediocre movies in release the past couple of weeks — and, overall, a perfectly dreadful summer movie season — all that die-hard movie lovers can do is await the end of Hollywood’s silly season in anticipation of the start of autumn’s rollout of potential Oscar contenders.
If you’re in the mood for dramatized biographies, the coming autumn movie season has a bumper crop, covering a wide range of subjects. Singers Bobby Darin and Ray Charles, Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, sex expert Alfred Kinsey, “Peter Pan’s” author J.M. Barrie, mogul Howard Hughes and world conqueror Alexander the Great have their own biopics. Want to go the other way? There’s also a bumper crop of fantasies.
Jack Mathews, in today’s New York Daily News, provides a full autumn season movie guide, as he writes about films ranging from Reese Witherspoon’s Vanity Fair (opening Sept. 1), surefire Oscar contender Jamie Foxx in Ray, director Oliver Stone’s much anticipated Alexander, right through to the Christmas Day opening of The Phantom of the Opera.
Beyond the mainstream fare, as Elizabeth Weitman writes, there’s a raft of star-driven independent and foreign import films (have a look at The Motorcycle Diaries) that will not only dominate the art-house lineup this fall season, but will likely find favour with the Academy come Oscar time.
For the documentary lover, the late summer and fall promises a flurry of political documentaries, ranging from Born into Brothels, set in Calcutta’s red-light district and featuring a lively group of children whose mothers are prostitutes, to Bush’s Brain, which sets its sights not on the President’s grey matter but on that of Karl Rove’s, Bush’s uber-advisor.
Families can look forward to some awfully big adventures, from Jim Carrey in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, through to Disney’s The Incredibles, Shark Tale from Dreamworks, The Polar Express from Warner Bros., and Johnny Depp in Finding Neverland, from Miramax, among a host of films that will keep children and adults equally entertained.

As promised yesterday, an update on the U.S. Memorial Day weekend box office. Leonard Klady at MovieCityNews.com (from whence the chart you see above was ‘appropriated’), weighs in with his informative analysis.
John Hamann, at Box Office Prophets offers the folks at 20th Century Fox some degree of succour with this piece of heartening news: “the gross for Day sets a record as the biggest second-place gross ever.”
Meanwhile, the folks at IMDB’s Studio Briefing inform us that the two top films which opened this Memorial Day weekend have established a new box office record, besting last year’s record-breaking grosses of $85.7 million for Jim Carrey’s Bruce Almighty, and $45.6 million for The Matrix Reloaded.

The Day After Tomorrow ad satire

Perhaps satirical ads, such as the one to the right — not to mention, some pretty savage reviews — hurt the opening box office for this weekend’s summer blockbuster, The Day After Tomorrow, but as far as VanRamblings is concerned, Roland Emmerich’s film has proved to be the most entertaining of the summer blockbusters thus far in 2004, even if the story and dialogue are a tad clichéd.
Seems the movie-going public didn’t agree, though. Now, let’s get real for a moment: taking in a three-day box office total of $70, in its first weekend, can’t be considered small change, but with no spike in the Saturday box office over Friday, salutary box office in the days to come hardly holds out much hope of turning the disaster epic into a summer blockbuster smash. Oh well. Still, Monday is a holiday in the U.S., and final figures will probably spike some.
With The Day After Tomorrow in second, Shrek once again emerged as the box office winner, taking in a gross of $73.1 million, for a record-setting $238,800,000 12-day total. Troy ran a distant third at $11.5 million, while Touchstone’s Kate Hudson-starring domestic comedy, Raising Helen, took in a modest $11.2 million in its opening weekend. The only other newcomer this week, Snoop Dogg’s Soul Plane, crashed on take-off.
When Memorial Day figures are published on Monday — this is a long weekend in the U.S., after all — VanRamblings will update this story, with links to various sites which provide perspective on the weekend box office.

Although VanRamblings had predicted a couple of days ago that Shrek 2 was on its way to setting a box office record for the month of May, in fact, the Dreamworks release clobbered its way to 3-day weekend record, to become — along with Spiderman — only the second film ever to cross the $100 million mark Friday to Sunday.
How much has Shrek 2 raked in since last Wednesday? Would you believe $125,300,000? If figures hold when final numbers are released on Monday, the total box office will set a new record for a Wednesday release, besting the $124.1 million earned by Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King last December.