Yet Universal had high hopes for Brüno's opening weekend. Barrios noted that GLAAD staffers had seen an early cut of the film, and "unfortunately, the scenes that we had the biggest concerns about remained in the film," including one of Brüno having S&M sex with his male assistant and another of Brüno holding his infant son in a hot tub with other adult males. The film "decreases the public's comfort with gay people," GLAAD president Jarrett Barrios said, adding that some scenes "hit the gay community pretty hard and reinforce some damaging, hurtful stereotypes" an observation that was recirculated in the Twitterverse. But the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation was not amused. Baron Cohen probably figured that if anyone can take a joke, it's gay people. The other was the reaction by the gay community to the movie's depiction of an asinine, predatory homosexual. (See pictures of a postMichael Jackson family tree.) One was the death of Michael Jackson, which spurred the filmmakers to remove a scene in which Brüno asks La Toya Jackson for the King of Pop's phone number. But he and Universal (which paid a hefty $42.5 million for rights to the movie and launched a worldwide marketing campaign that brought the pre-release tab to about $100 million) had two hints that things could go wrong. He's beyond brazen in his forced marriage of suicide raids on homophobes and the cartoon mockery of rural Southerners sort of al-Qaeda and Al Capp. (A new romantic comedy, I Love You, Beth Cooper, raised barely a titter, or a Twitter, pulling in just $5 million.) ( Bruno and the Rest: See TIME's complete Summer Arts Preview.)īaron Cohen, whose first job after graduating from Cambridge University was as a fashion model, deserves credit for pushing further than he did in Borat. Whatever reservations you might have about these movies as works of popular art, the numbers are good news, in the blockbuster-dominated summer market, for the little movies that could. Sandra Bullock's comeback film is well past the $100 million mark, and The Hangover is well past $200 million. In the niche market of real-people movies, the two wedding-panic comedies, The Proposal and The Hangover, held their audiences, losing only 18% and 12% respectively from the previous weekend. (Is this the crappiest movie in that exalted category? Even worse than the Jar Jar Binksinfected Star Wars: Episode I The Phanton Menace? Discuss.) In fewer than 20 days, the second Transformers has overtaken the first one in its entire domestic theatrical run and entered the all-time top 20, passing every Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribbean movie. And that overblown toy story, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, has earned more than that just in North America. In its second weekend, the 3-D cartoon Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs is projected to finish right behind Brüno, at $28.5 million, for a worldwide 10-day gross of $312.5 million. (See pictures of Sacha Baron Cohen's outrageous Brüno promotions.)Īs Brüno flounced and floundered with audiences, two other behemoths stood sturdy. Brüno could be the first movie defeated by the Twitter effect. Yet Brüno's box-office decline from Friday to Saturday indicates that the film's brand of outrage was not the sort to please most moviegoers and that their tut-tutting got around fast. Brüno, the Sacha Baron Cohen docu-comedy in which an Austrian fashion journalist shoves his flamboyant gayness in the faces and other body parts of unsuspecting Americans, won the weekend with $30.4 million, a bit above most industry expectations for an R-rated provocation whose star was unknown to the mass audience until his Borat became a surprise hit in 2006, earning more than $260 million at theaters worldwide on an $18 million budget. That appears to be the lesson from the studio estimates issued on July 13 for the weekend box office. But in the age of Twitter, electronic word-of-mouth is immediate, as early moviegoers tweet their opinions on a film to millions of "followers." Instant-messaging can make or break a film within 24 hours. Follow the old days like, until yesterday movie studios judged the success of their big pictures by how much they grossed on the opening weekend.
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