Trek flies to $43 mil in second week

By Keith Williams

Angels and Demons scores big at weekend box office

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 5/17/09 — Dead popes, religious fanatics and a very big bottle of anti-matter helped propel the new Tom Hanks/Dan Brown ecclesiastical thriller Angels & Demons to the top of the charts this weekend, decoding an estimated $48 million at 3527 papal palaces. Knocked out of orbit into second place, Star Trek fell by 43% to earth, hitting a still potent $43 million.

Written and published before The Da Vinci Code captured the imagination of the world, Angels & Demons, remodelled as a sequel to that 2006 blockbuster, attracted arguably less vicious reviews, but definitely lower grosses – DVC opening to $77 million, en route to a worldgrab of $753 million. Criticisms of that former effort all harped on about the absurdities of the plot, the turgid direction, and Tom Hanks’s haircut. This time the haircut escapes derision, the direction is sprightlier, but the daftness of the hare-brained scheme to blow up the Vatican seems even more ludicrous and unexciting than you’d ever think possible.

Controversy is far less muted this time too, not helped by the head office of the Catholic Church branding it “harmless”. Er, thanks guys, that’ll get you a Xmas card from Columbia. Trouble is, what made the Dan Brown novels such enjoyable trash-reading were the pseudo-historical revelations that fleshed out their b-movie plots. DVC over-dosed on them to the extent of stopping the film in its tracks, here in A & D the paucity of such information – or when it comes, albeit sparsely, providing little mystery or insight at all – leaves the cadaver of the plot thin, predictable and uninvolving. Its predecessor in both book and film caught the zeitgeist of the moment.

This, its poorer sister doesn’t (though expect Dan Brown’s long-awaited crypto-adventure, The Lost Symbol, to be HUGE upon release in September), and after initial curiosity from the zimmer-frame generation wears off, watch it plummet into box-office hell where there’s a special screening room reserved for movies as blandly watchable as this.

Blockbuster du Jour two weeks ago, Wolverine slid by 44% to land $14.8 million, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past by 33% to $6.9 million (a ghostly $40 million so far), and Obsessed by 30% to stalk a hungry $4.6 million. At home at no 6 in the charts, 17 Again lost only 20% in teen adoration to entice $3.4 million, Monsters vs Aliens tripped a mere 8% to abduct $3 million, The Soloist fiddled $2.4 million in 39% drop in walk-by business, while Next Day Air blew a feeble $2.3 million on a 44% change in wind direction. Earth in the meantime was to be found clinging to the top ten exit sill, having fallen by 36% for a weedy $1.7 million.

Weekend Estimates courtesy leesmovieinfo.net