There I was writing off Tom Cruise as a has been, and look how wrong I am (again). Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol goes to Number 1 in the US Box Office, beating two new Steven Spielberg films, a new Matt Damon film, the 2nd Sherlock Holmes, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and Alvin and The Chipmunks 3. If that isn't star power, I don't know what is.
There are many other films, film makers and studios who should be worrying. The Darkest Hour, about a bunch of young Americans battling aliens in Moscow took a measly $5 million, barely scraping into the the Top 10, but it was a silly idea to release it at this time of year anyway. But for War Horse to open with $15 million must be a big concern. This is a film that was being talked about as a possible Oscar contender, and yet it can barely scrape up $2300 per screen in nearly 3000 screens. What does seem strange was the decision to release 2 Spielberg films in the same week. Tintin was released in the UK weeks ago, and doesn't seem to me much like a Christmas movie, although it has done better than the horse one, with $24 million and the No 5 slot.
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was always going to be a hard sell in America, and its audience may grow through word of mouth, but it is faintly depressing to see it topped by the homoerotic bromance that is Sherlock Holmes: Game Of Shadows. Part of the problem is that in the USA, Christmas is the time for releasing all the big titles at once, creating a kind of pointless logjam of movies all of them jostling for position. Given that it's the holiday season, I suppose it's hardly surprising that people go to the films which are least demanding and most familiar which means sequels, name recognition and movie stars. MI and SH ask very little of their audiences apart from an ability to sit there with their mouths open gawping at the expensive stunts that are being performed for their benefit. Like a very expensive circus. By contrast, films about WW!, anal rape and vengeful women, Belgian boy detectives and so forth, just don't have that same wow factor.
