Box Office: Audiences Go Bananas Over Apes
July 29 -- What do moviegoers really, really want? Substandard remakes of fondly remembered classic movies, it would seem.
That's the message sent loud and clear by the opening weekend gross of the (positively) new and (dubiously) improved Planet of the Apes, which registered a three-day bonanza surpassed in cinematic history only by the still sturdy debut of The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
Maybe that remake of Casablanca isn't such a bad idea after all — at least from a commercial standpoint. Just be sure it's directed by Tim Burton. And if you can work a few anthropomorphic apes — with makeup by Rick Baker, of course — into the plot, so much the better.
Burton's Apes cashed in on a lack of competing new product and a saturation-level marketing campaign rivaling the aggressiveness of May's Pearl Harbor promotional blitzkrieg to rack up approximately $69.5 million (according to studio estimates compiled by Exhibitor Relations) over its first three days in theaters. Only Lost World's venerable $72 million mark is higher, though Apes will need every nickel of its estimated haul to stay ahead of rival 2001 release The Mummy Returns ($68.1 million) when actual figures are released.
Critics were generally of a mind to quibble with Apes' cardboard characters, garbled and unfocused scripting, and overall lack of scope, but their jeremiads were paid little heed by a spectacle-hungry public. Among the many records which it now can claim, Apes posted the biggest one-day Friday gross ever ($25 million), and the biggest non-holiday three-day opening ever (Lost World opened on the Friday before Memorial Day in 1997).
Jurassic III Goes Over a Cliff, Dolittle II Tops $100 million
Lost in the furor over Apes' amazing opening was the dizzying downward spiral of Jurassic Park III, which tumbled an estimated 56 percent from its own massive opening frame to finish a very distant second with approximately $22.5 million. The ensemble romantic comedy America's Sweethearts, the weekend's third-highest grosser, fared only slightly better, taking a second-weekend plunge of 48 percent to finish with an estimated $15.7 million.
