Sunday
by scurrying past Buzz, Woody and their ``Toy Story 2'' pals to claim the North
AmericanSunday December 19, 1999
'Stuart Little' Is Big Cheese at Box Office
By Dean Goodman
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A sharp-dressing talking mouse surprised movie industry pundits
Sunday
by scurrying past Buzz, Woody and their ``Toy Story 2'' pals to claim the North
American
weekend box office crown.
``Stuart Little,'' a film based on the classic E.B. White tale about an orphaned mouse adopted by a
human family, earned about $15.4 million for the Friday-to-Sunday period, said its distributor,
Columbia Pictures.
``Toy Story 2'' (Walt Disney Pictures) fell to No. 3 after three weekends at No. 1, with $12.1 million.
In between, holding at No. 2 in its second weekend, was ``The Green Mile'' (Warner Bros.) with
$12.6 million. All figures are based on estimates issued by the studios on Sunday. More accurate data
will be released on Monday.
With the studios cranking out movies to capitalize on the holiday season, the top 10 contained two
other new releases, both with modest hauls. ``Bicentennial Man'' (Touchstone), starring Robin
Williams, earned about $8.3 million, tying at No. 4 with the Touchstone holdover ``Deuce Bigalow:
Male Gigolo.'' Jodie Foster's ``Anna and the King'' (Fox) opened at No. 6 with $5.1 million.
According to Exhibitor Relations Co., which collects the studios' estimates, the top 12 movies this
weekend grossed a combined $74.1 million, up 4 percent both from the year-ago and week-ago
periods.
Next week boasts a busy schedule of new releases, beginning with ``Girl, Interrupted'' on Dec. 21,
followed a day later by ''Any Given Sunday,'' ``Man on the Moon'' and ``Snow Falling on Cedars.''
Christmas Day offerings include ``Galaxy Quest,'' ''The Talented Mr'' ``Angela's Ashes'' and ``Play it
to the Bone.''
But back to the current weekend, a Columbia spokesman said the studio had expected ``Stuart Little''
to open with between $10 million and $12 million, dueling for honors with the ``Toy Story''/''Green
Mile'' double. Instead it pulled ahead, fueled by a two-pronged appeal both to adults who had read
White's 1945 book as children, and to their own kids who got to see a computer animated mouse
engaged in a series of high jinks. Geena Davis and British actor Hugh Laurie star as the parents of
Stuart, who is voiced by Michael J. Fox.
Columbia, a unit of Sony Corp., has had only two other No. 1 movies this year, Adam Sandler's ``Big
Daddy'' in June and Martin Lawrence's ``Blue Streak'' in September.
``Stuart Little'' posted the highest average in the top 10 with a solid $5,351 tally. ``Bicentennial Man''
averaged a so-so $3,296, while ``Anna and the King'' averaged just $2,390.
``Bicentennial Man,'' in which Williams plays a robot with human qualities, pulled in a wide
cross-section of moviegoers, said Chuck Viane, president of Walt Disney Co.'s Buena Vista Pictures
distribution unit.
``This is a really decent start,'' he said, noting that exit polling indicated that audiences liked it.
``Anna and the King,'' a lavish take on the romance between a widowed 19th century school teacher
and the King of Siam, attracted mostly older women, said Tom Sherak, chairman of Twentieth
Century Fox's domestic distribution unit.
``It's not quite where we wanted it to go, but its business is in front of it,'' Sherak said.
The 10-day total for ``The Green Mile'' stands at $36.5 million, and its 30 percent drop from last
weekend was the smallest in the top 10. ``Toy Story 2'' has $156.3 million after one month, while
``Deuce Bigalow's'' 10-day total rose to $24.3 million.
Rounding out the top 10 were MGM's ``The World Is Not Enough'' at No. 7 with $4.0 million (31-day
total $105.3 million); Paramount's ``Sleepy Hollow'' at No. 8 with $3.0 million (31-day total $85.9
million); Universal's ``End of Days'' at No. 9 with $2.9 million (26-day total $57.8 million); and
Universal's ``The Bone Collector'' at No. 10 with $1.0 million (45-day total $62.4 million).
Universal Pictures is a unit of Seagram Co. Ltd. Paramount Pictures is a unit of Viacom Inc.
Twentieth Century Fox is a unit of Fox Entertainment Group Inc. Warner Bros. is a unit of Time
Warner Inc. MGM's full name is Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. Walt Disney Pictures and Touchstone
Pictures are units of Walt Disney Co. ``Toy Story 2'' is a production between Disney and Pixar
Animation Studios Inc.
The top 10 movies at the box office
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Following are the top 10 movies at the North American box office for
the Dec. 17-19 weekend, according to studio estimates collected Sunday by Reuters. Final data will
be released Monday.
1 (+) Stuart Little ....................$15.4 million
2 (2) The Green Mile ...................$12.6 million
3 (1) Toy Story 2 ......................$12.1 million
4-(3) Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo ....... $8.3 million
4-(+) Bicentennial Man ................. $8.3 million
6 (+) Anna and the King ................ $5.1 million
7 (4) The World Is Not Enough .......... $4.0 million
8 (6) Sleepy Hollow .................... $3.0 million
9 (5) End of Days ...................... $2.9 million
10 (7) The Bone Collector ............... $1.0 million.
NOTE: Last weekend's position in parenthesis. + - new release.
Stuart Little is released by Columbia Pictures, a unit of Sony Corp.
The Green Mile is released by Warner Bros., a unit of Time Warner Inc.
Toy Story 2 is a production between Pixar Animation Studios Inc and Walt Disney Pictures, a unit of
Walt Disney Co. Disney's Touchstone Pictures unit released Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo and
Bicentennial Man.
Anna and the King is released by Twentieth Century Fox, a unit of Fox Entertainment Group Inc.
The World is Not Enough is released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.
Sleepy Hollow is released by Paramount Pictures, a unit of Viacom Inc.
End of Days and The Bone Collector are released by Universal Pictures, a unit of Seagram Co. Ltd.
(NasdaqNM:PIXR - news) (NYSE:MGM - news) (6758.T) (NYSE:VIA - news) (NYSE:TWX -
news) (NYSE:FOX - news) (NYSE:DIS - news) (Toronto:VO.TO - news)
JOHN L.: I'm back this week and there is a lot to cover. It is the attack of the crazy mice and the old fashioned action figures as Stuart Little and Green Mil'es little rodents dominate the number one and two spots at the box office. Robin Williams stumbles big time with Bicentennial Man which is somewhat surprising. It also looks like Jodie Foster will be rethinking her ideas about Silence of the Lamb sequels, and Chow Yun Fat may be looking at maybe playing a villain in the Rush Hour sequel. He has not had much luck working with over hyped white actors, how about over paid black ones. I also checked out The Green Mile and will have a full review in this very report. It's been a while since a full BOR was up, so let's get to it.
What is it with Hollywood and animatronic movie stars? In the top 2 movies
this week, Little and Mile both have mice running around getting in people's
way. Toy Story does not have any mice that I can remember, but none of the
actors are real. The avatars will not be human, but 4 legged creatures that
humans are trained to exterminate on sight. Tom Hanks and Michael J. Fox don't
have to worry about ugly beards and Parkinson
shakes when they can practically come to work naked for 3 weeks and record their
parts and collect the easy paycheck. Stuart Little defied even the movie studios
predictions and came out on top of established hitmakers like Hanks and Robin
Williams. This movie could have gone two ways. Opened on top or bombed horribly.
This had the slight scent of a Babe 2 disaster, but the ad campaign overcame
generally positive reviews which tend to kill the box office of kid films. Iron
Giant and South Park are pretty good cartoons, but when the critics gave their
seal of approval, people tuned out. Pokemon is one of the worst reviewed movies
of the year next to Phantom Menace and it opens to $53 million its first weekend
out. Toy Story 2 gets the best reviews since Schindler's List and opens super
strong based on its name, but it leveled quickly and may just equal the gross of
the first TS. SL has a lot going for it that helped it this weekend. For one it
is based on a very popular children's story that about 75% of kids have read
that read on a regular basis. Another thing is that it has talking animals and a
cute mouse getting into trouble. Mice have been fodder for entertainment ever
since comedy writers thought it would be funny if a 2 ton elephant screams in
terror at the site of a 2 ounce mouse. Special effects that try to look real are
usually good for a box office push. Stuart is very fake, but seems to move and
interact just as well as Roger Rabbit did back in the day. Jonathan Lipnicki is
no bigger than a mouse and his "cute" factor has been working for him
since he talked about rabbits with Tom Cruise and Rene Zelwegger. This kid is 9
years old and still can pass for 5 or six on screen. He will be joining Haley
Joel Osment and Jake Lloyd on Sally Jesse Raphael in 10 years high on coke.
Child actors rarely have a good life. Geena Davis and Michael J. Fox are 2
actors who were huge in the 80s and early 90s. Fox could never get a consistent
movie career going past his Delorean scifi pics, and Davis has had 3 hit movies
and an Academy Award. First one to name me her 3 most successful pics and the
one she one an Oscar for will get mentioned in my next report. Send the email to
jldmoox@xoommail.com. This flick won't
do much for them, but if it can make about $60 million and do well on video,
they can hope to get some sequel money. Stuart Little looks to be a modest
success for Columbia Pictures and that is good. We need more family movies so
the pundits will lay off Hollywood when they want to do something more risky.
Green Mile opened in second place last week and stayed there this week, the
difference being that it beat Toy Story 2. I happened to check this movie out
over the last week, and here are my thoughts. Steven King returns to the big
screen with another prison movie. This one is much more supernatural than
Shawshank Redemption was. But much like other King 
stories
there is a certain bit of reality thrown in to magnify any type of terror that
might occur. You believe that the events you are watching might happen in the
real world. You know, like a group of white southerners with guns and rakes
coming up on a 7 foot black man holding 2 dead, bloody, blonde, little white
girls and just read him his rights. You are at a death row cell block with most
prisoners being nice guys who feel really bad about killing the person or
persons they did. The guards on the Green Mile death row are for the most part
family men who treat each inmate sternly but fairly and are willing to talk to
them as friends. A mouse gets loose on the row and instead of killing it right
away they feed it and let a killer play with it like it was a hamster on a
wheel. Any guard that curses or hits a prisoner or even thinks of killing any
kind of rodent pet they might have will be immediately strung up in a straight
jacket and put in solitary confinement. The only offense a prisoner on the mile
can do to get put in the padded room is to urinate on another guard. Oh yeah,
even though a person can only spell his name and speak in halted sentences, he
will be treated with respect because he has a magic cure for urinary infections
and brain tumors. Make sure you put a WET sponge on the head of the guy in old
sparky or the electrocution might hurt a whole lot. You don’t want to see what
happens when the
sponge is dry and it can’t conduct electricity the right way. Ooo, the smell.
It will disturb the witnesses. Oh yeah, if you are in a nursing home, you can
sneak out everyday and hike 5 miles to a cabin in the Blair Witch Woods and play
with a 70 year old mouse. Oh, and if you find out a guy on death row is innocent
and should not be put to death, it is still fine to kill the person in the chair
if he says it’s okay. Green Mile is an okay movie, a better book, but a stupid
over sentimental story. It lives in an idealistic world that if anything similar
happened in real life, nothing would have happened. The movie will not satisfy
the people looking for happy endings. The electrocution in the middle is said to
be brutal and graphic, but it really does not show anything to disgusting. Read
the book for details of that bit. Hanks is his typical southern good guy self. I
was sitting there waiting for him to eat chocolates he is so nice. Michael
Clarke Duncan as John Coffey sounds like the drink but spelled differently is
fine, but it is not as large as the ads and the main plot suggest. He plays the
type of dimwitted black man that Hollywood loves to portray as the savior of the
white world with his lack of education causing him to relay real truths to the
unenlightened masses. You know like the new inmate who curses, urinates and
beats up guards, and kills people is a "bad man." Duhh, but he is so
sweet when he says it. Duncan is still a growing actor, and this is his biggest
role in his career. He was just background in Armageddon, this time he gets to
sleep on a cot a lot. He is acting in this movie because in interviews he is
pretty articulate and a Mommas boy. Maybe he should play an action hero. The
idiot savant role is sort of tired and offensive to some people inclined to be
offended by such things. Michael Jeter is excellent as one of the inmates on the
Mile, and he should be waiting by his phone on Oscar nomination day. Duncan and
the guy who played Percy were good as well and should keep their beeper
batteries fresh. This movie is very long, but is not that boring. I did not fall
asleep once. Some might especially if they are going into it fresh without
knowing what is going to happen. There is a mouse in the movie named Mr. Jangles
which is very cute and a bit more significant than Tom Hanks is in the movie.
Stand By Me proposed that a fight between Mighty Mouse and Superman would be a
good one. I want to see Mr. Jangles vs Stuart Little. That to me is the money
match. Final review: Thumbs up; 3 stars; B; 7 out of 10. Go see it. Its very
close to the book and there are a lot of scenes of people pissing. You gotta
love that.
After 2 straight years of box office success at this time with Flubber and
Patch Adams, Robin Williams has "flubbed" on his newest wacky
adventure in Bicentennial Man. Eight million is not a good start for a Williams
family picture. On paper, it looked like this flick would get $25 to $35 million
its first week. Williams playing a robot who becomes more human over 200 years
as he interacts with different families and little kids and finds romance. The
comic and sappy possibilities are endless. RW 
can
do his routines in the context of a robot learning humor sort of like a Data
from Star Trek type of thing. You also have that Heidi Eisenberg who lip syncs
Pepsi commercials and Damien from Jurassic Park. These are some well known
actors. I don’t get it myself. Actually, I had no plans of seeing this movie
because it did look sort of weak and predictable. Oliver Platt shows up as a
scientist, but is there once again to get goofed on. One scene has Williams
saying he has a big head. I have said in the past that Platt is a good actor who
continues to be misused in film. I think the problem this movie has is that it
is not as family friendly as the previews lead you to believe. It is more about
how the robot continues to exist while all of his friends and family die around
him. It gets more depressing than watching David Morse no sell a spittake in The
Green Mile. The best way for a movie like this to open well is for it to have a
good preview. Unfortunately, BM did not have one. The main flaw is that it seems
to show the whole movie. He is the robot maid of the future (2005) and lives for
200 years and becomes more human so Robin Williams does not have to stay in the
robot costume all of the time. They show him kiss a woman for the first time and
like it and they even show a flying car. It did not seem all that amazing. One
day they will make movie about a robot that likes being a robot. Artoo Deetoo
never wanted to be human and he is the most popular robot in the last 30 years.
Andrew Martin the Robot will not make that list.
Deuce Bigalow Male Gigolo opened last week to a pretty good $12 million and
continues to do fairly well for a movie that only cost $8 million and was
produced by that current god of the box office, Adam Sandler. Now, this movie
does seem to show every gag or how most gags are set up. Deuce is sort of a
nebish, and has to get the females that are rejected by the general public. He
gets the tourrettes syndrome cursing chick, the 7 foot
tall amazon, the narcoleptic, the female impersonator, and the lady with an
artificial leg. He needs to do this because he broke an fish tank. The hilarity
ensues I guess. The gags set up incidents that should play out in various
hilarious and perverted ways that can’t be shown in a 30 second preview clip.
Rob Schneider can be funny, and has been in movies and Saturday Night Live. That
appeal of him getting a starring role and no longer a sidekick to Sandler or
Sylvester Stallone is also bringing people into the theaters. It looks like $50
million might be its final tally which is good. Schneider may be making $15-20
million in 2 years if his box office numbers keep up. It’s already made more
money than Billy Madison.
Anna and the King came out and no one cares. And why should they? Once again,
the savior of the Asian race must be the Caucasian. I guess 7 years in Tibet did
not teach Hollywood anything. Just once it would be nice to see an movie about
Asian people and culture that focused on Asians. They always have to be invaded
and subservient to other people and races which makes it pointless to watch. You
have to appeal to the majority look, so the majority is stuck in there to be
more acceptable to audiences. 
However,
it does not seem to help get people to see movies that try to be all important
and politically correct. The Asian epic has not been successful since The Last
Emperor. Another thing is that this movie is a non musical version of the King
and I. Oh joy. Yul Brynner can roll over in his grave again after Lou Diamond
Phillips bastardized the role on stage. Chow Yun Fat is still trying to
establish a fan base in the U.S. I don’t think the fans of his Hong Kong shoot
em ups will sit through Jodie Foster doing another bad accent. I cannot stand
American actors doing British accents. It drives me nuts. English actors doing
American accents is just as upsetting. Nicole Kidman and Catherine Zeta Jones do
that a lot and it is very distracting when you know how they really talk. Their
voices become all stilted and they always look like they have to concentrate
really really hard to get the words out unless they scream and their true voice
comes out. Bob Hoskins and Meryl Streep are the only actors that should be
allowed to change accents. All else should stop, see Brad Pitt and Gwen Paltrow
for other examples. I don’t know what it will take to make one of these movies
successful with the mainstream audience. Maybe Chris Tucker can be in the next
one.
THE REST OF THE TOP 10 IN 10:
That is it for this week. Next week has a lot of stuff as well and should be quite eventful. It will be quite the task for Stuart Little to stay at number one let alone the top 10. Tim Allen competes with himself, Paltrow haunts us again, Pacino is looking for the right stuff, Angelina Jolie hopes to enter the top 10 again, and Jim Carrey hopes to take the top spot with a biopic of an actor most famous for not making any sense. I plan to see at least one of those movies before the end of the year. Next week will be a special post Christmas edition of the Box Office Report and then there will be a very special Year in Review up on January 1, 2000. Bye for now.
ABOUT JOHN L.'S KICKIN' BOX OFFICE REPORTS
THIS WEEK'S BOX OFFICE REPORT LAST WEEK'S BOX OFFICE REPORT
THE BEST AND WORST MOVIES OF 1999
EMAIL: