Summer Flicks

Over at Pajama Guy, LAGuy is talking about movies (big surprise, right?) with, among other things, a look at the opening day's gross take for MI-III. With that in mind, let's look at some of the other big movies opening this summer and see what's expected of them. Both Premiere and EW have posted their prospective top ten's and they're both pretty interesting lists.

Premiere

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Superman Returns
Cars
X-Men: The Last Stand
MI-III
Over the Hedge
The DaVinci Code
Click
Miami Vice
You, Me and Dupree

EW

Superman Returns
MI-III
X-Men
Cars
The DaVinci Code
Pirates
Over the Hedge
Poseidon
The Break-Up
Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

They also give projected grosses, which I know everyone in Hollywood cares about but I don't, so I'm not going to bother with those. Anyway, let's take a look at those lists for a moment. The first seven flicks are the same on both lists, although they're ranked differently. EW doesn't think Pirates is going to do as good as Premiere does and Premiere thinks that MI-III will do better than EW does and neither one of them are quite sure how well DaVinci will do but other than that, the first seven are pretty much locked in for both publications. After that is where it gets interesting.

Poseidon and Miami Vice are two well-known productions with huge budgets to recoup and big question marks attached. With Poseidon, the first question is “Why?” And well, okay, that’s also the second, third and fourth question, too. Unfortunately, I can’t think of a good answer. Maybe the producers are trying to recreate the perfect storm of the summer of ’72, when a war was raging and gas prices were soaring and people were into big disaster flicks but, personally, I wouldn’t bet on it.

As for Miami Vice, well, let’s hear what (creator) Michael Mann has to say about it: “The last thing I would have been interested in was just doing a remake,” he’s quoted as saying in EW. “We’re doing Miami Vice as if there never had been a television series, doing it real.” While I can understand why Mann would want to lose certain, um, aspects of the original series (there are a bunch of things about the ‘80’s I’d just as soon forget myself), is it possible to take a show that was so emblematic of its time and place and disregard much of what made it popular in the first place? Get ready for the Miami Vice you never knew and loved, sort of like an Oreo version of Bad Boys.

Two of the other flicks on the list (Click and Talladega Nights) are the latest comedies from two stars (Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell) that on paper, at least, seem to play to their strengths; in Click, Sandler finds a remote that allows him to change reality and in Nights, Ferrell plays an ace NASCAR driver who has to contend with a foreign Formula 1 driver crowding his territory. No doubt untold wackiness will ensue. Now, I have to be honest and admit that I'm not a big fan of low-brow comedy. Well, okay, that's not completely true, either. I loved Airplane and the first Scary Movie so maybe I just have to be in the right mood. And, interestingly enough, whenever Sandler or Ferrell are on the screen, I'm not - in the right mood, that is. Anyway, based solely on the blurbs in each magazine, I'll give Click the nod here. The writers did pretty well with Bruce Almighty and besides, any movie with Christopher Walken is always worth a try.

The last two movies are clearly reaches, like tenth round picks in the NFL draft. If either one pulls through then great, if not, well, that’s what tenth round picks are for. Both choices are directly the result of last year’s summer surprise, The Wedding Crashers. Call it the Owen Vaughn connection. Vince Vaughn was one of the stars of the aforementioned Wedding Crashers and he’s also one of the stars of The Break-Up, opposite his current (possibly) amour, Jennifer Aniston. Owen Wilson, also one of the stars of The Wedding Crashers, is starring in You, Me and Dupree, which sounds suspiciously like a Steely Dan song. The problem here is that Wilson and Vaughn are not starring the same movie so the producers are hoping that the two of them can strike lightning again, only this time separately. Will it happen? Again, I wouldn’t bet on it. There will, no doubt, be a couple of surprises this summer, but chalk these two up to William Goldman’s famous “Non-Recurring Phenomenon”.

So, what would I pick? Glad you asked.

First of all, I’m going to stick with the top seven picks of both magazines. Granted, there’s always the possibility that a movie outside the top seven may over-perform (or one of the seven may under-perform, which is what MI-III appears to have done this weekend) but I would agree that those are the seven to beat. Also, I’m not going to predict box-office because, as I mentioned before, how much a movie makes doesn’t mean diddly to me. I do wonder just what they’ve been smoking at EW, though. They pick six of the movies to make $200 million or more. If they’re talking domestic gross, I don’t think that’s happened before. Anyway, for what it’s worth, here’s my list:

Superman Returns
The DaVinci Code
Cars
X-Men: The Last Stand
Over the Hedge
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
MI-III (this one’s a cheat, I know)
Snakes on a Plane
Lady in the Water
Little Miss Sunshine

So there you have it. If I’m right, well, you read it here first. If not, there’s always William Goldman’s other famous dictum: “Nobody Knows Anything”.