1. "2012" ($23.5 million)
2. "A Christmas Carol" ($5.6 million)
3. "The Men Who Stare At Goats" ($1.95 million)
4. "Precious: Based On The Novel 'Push' By Sapphire" ($1.94 million)
5. "The Fourth Kind" ($1.8 million)
Moviegoers braved Armageddon on Friday night by confronting "2012," the Roland Emmerich-directed disaster epic. The film boasts some considerable star power such as John Cusack, Danny Glover, Woody Harrelson and Amanda Peet, but "2012's" major draw has nothing to do with the acting and everything to do with the action of a world-ending calamity. Despite its subject matter, however, "2012" was anything but a disaster as shown by its whopping $23.5 million intake on Friday evening, with a likely weekend total of over $60 million. Read more...
1. "A Christmas Carol" ($31 million)
2. "Michael Jackson's This Is It" ($14 million)
3. "The Men Who Stare At Goats" ($13.3 million)
2. "The Fourth Kind" ($12.5 million)
5. "Paranormal Activity" ($8.6 million)
Did Ebenezer Scrooge learn his lesson at the box office this weekend? It's difficult to say, as the Jim Carrey-starring "A Christmas Carol" certainly took the top prize with a $31 million weekend, though the result is considered relatively disappointing given the film's potential draw to family crowds and its hefty budget of $200 million. The odds of the holiday movie recouping that number anytime soon are rather small, though we've certainly seen stranger box office occurrences lately. Read more...
FROM MTV.COM: With the fumbled release of "The Fourth Kind," sneaky-hip viral movie marketing shoots itself in the foot. It's been 10 years since the makers of "The Blair Witch Project" used the Internet to plant eerie suggestions that the events in their film were real. Today the Internet is patrolled by a legion of bull-sniffing bloggers, so any attempt to do the same thing again is doomed to fail. And the picture expends so much of its energy trying to pound home its preposterous assertions that there's very little left over to animate the story, which is in any case a hopeless jumble.
The movie is an attempted alien-abduction thriller. It begins with what is probably the most laughable opening scene of the year. Walking through some misty woods and straight up to the camera, the film's star, Milla Jovovich, informs us that everything we're about to see is true — that it's "supported by archived footage" and is "extremely disturbing." But then we're also told that the names and professions of the characters have been changed. Why would that be, if they're all real people? The silly premise instantly begins to crumble.
Continue reading 'The Fourth Kind': Impossible Dreams, By Kurt Loder
We viewers can't tell exactly what is so frightening in the below clip, the latest in our week of Halloween exclusives, from "The Fourth Kind," directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi. Maybe Milla Jovovich can't either, but she at least knows it's "not an owl." Whatever it is, it scared the crap out of her. That scream is impressive.
It was 32 years ago that director Steven Spielberg introduced viewers to the "third kind" of extraterrestrial encounter -- contact -- in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." The title "The Fourth Kind" refers to the next stage in encountering aliens: abductions. The movie, based on fact, looks at a small Alaska town where a string of alien-related disappearances occurred.
