Photo of the Week: Speed Racer Speed Racer opened on Friday and crashed and burned with a precision normally reserved for movies titled Evan Almighty and Battlefield Earth. Despite the fact that Warner Brothers reportedly spent $150 million making the film itself and dropped another $100 million marketing it, Speed Racer's opening weekend totals topped out at $20 million. How bad is that? Evan Almighty's opening weekend pulled in $31 million. Who would have guessed that the Wachowski brothers' cartoonish vision of Speed Racer wouldn't have worked? Certainly not anyone who saw the above obviously-green-screened photo of stars Emile Hirsch and Christina Ricci. Click to enlarge.    News & Notes The Fallout from a Week of Phenomenal Grand Theft Auto IV Sales One of my biggest complaints with entertainment journalists is their inability to put numbers into perspective. Last year, it drove me nuts to continually read in Associated Press new stories that Blu-ray would be the next generation format winner. At the time the statements were being made, no numbers ever truly supported that line of thinking (other than those supplied by the Blu-ray’s PR department). Even when netflix was commenting that the customer demand for HD and Blu-Ray titles was about 50/50, journalists couldn’t stop from reporting that Blu-ray was going to win, with no reasons given. While preparing for the on-slaught of stories about how this year’s summer box office totals is down from last year, something else caught me off guard: the supposed impact that the release of Grand Theft Auto IV would have on the film world. Available to consumers on April 29th, Grand Theft Auto IV earned over $500 million during its first week on the market. As numerous agencies and publications have reported, this sum was more than any movie had earned in its first week in theaters. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (Pirates) came the closest to achieving this number and it took a little over a week to hit it. The stories would often go on to quote Take-Two Games’ chairman saying something to the effect that Grand Theft Auto IV’s release marked a new standard for the entertainment world. The point of the stories, though never explicit, was certainly clear. Namely: Oh my God! Hollywood is now playing second fiddle to the video game industry! Is the film industry on the outs?! It wouldn’t bother me if this was actually the case—which it most certainly is not—but the misrepresentation of numbers in these stories to even suggest this line of thinking is almost journalistically negligent. Since Piratesis the fastest movie ever to hit $500 million worldwide, the wire services like to use it as a comparison to Grand Theft Auto IV. Both products earned $500 million worldwide in a very short time. Grand Theft Auto IV did it in a week. Variety reported that Piratesdid $404 million worldwide in six days, so that puts it slightly behind Grand Theft Auto IV. The main difference though? The average price of a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV sold for $83. The average price of a ticket for Pirates? $6.30*. So, while the end cash may be roughly the same, Pirates had almost 80 million customers, Grand Theft Auto IV 6 million. Yet, this isn’t mentioned anywhere. If we assume that Grand Theft Auto IV ends up with an $950 million cumulative take, one that is in the vicinity of Pirates’own take, that wouldn’t even put Grand Theft Auto into the top five grossing movies of all time. Yup, Hollywood is almost through. * I arrived at the $6.30 figure by taking 2003’s average global ticket price, $5.20, and applying the same 5% increase that was shown from 2002-20003, to each year forward. Thusly making the average global movie ticket price at about $6.30. We Are Now Officially Innovation Experts Stumped? gets a lot of somewhat random press releases hyping everything from upcoming theatrical and DVD releases (which makes sense) to information about the George Foreman grill, Seattle art gallery openings and the New Mexico tourism industry. PR people see that we're an entertainment magazine and add us to their e-mail blast lists. It's not a big deal. Every once in a while though, we get a pitch or a press release that blows us away with its quizzical nature or downright stupidity (like the ones we get from syndicates offering us columns for senior readers). We recently received a press release promoting a book called The Seeker in Forever that caught us by surprise. The author of The Seeker in Forever was being sold to us as "an EXPERT SOURCE on the subjects of INNOVATION and SHOWMANSHIP IN BUSINESS" (caps courtesy of the publicist). This provided us with much to discuss; how exactly does one become an expert on innovation? And what does that even mean? It almost got us to request a copy of The Seeker in Forever so that we could learn. It was then that we noticed another tidbit of information that we had missed in our first glance over the press release: the expert source on innovation had written a fictional book. According to the press release, The Seeker in Forever is the kind of fiction that "contains valuable, practical lessons on the uses of innovation and of 'showmanship in business'." (Gratuitous repetition of the phrases innovation and showmanship in business again courtesy of the publicist). All of this is merely a lengthy explanation for how we at Stumped? decided that we are now all officially INNOVATION EXPERTS. (Caps my own). Step one: labeling yourself an innovation expert. Step two: see step one. "I'm Trying to Get My Black Bruce Willis On." My favorite story of the week comes courtesy of a quote from famed rapper/fashion designer/name changer, Sean Combs. Even though Time Magazine valued Combs' worth at more than $300 million in 2006, Combs isn't happy simply being a well-respected music producer, multi millionaire and a noted ladies man. No, he wants more. He wants to act. Combs has shown up in a number of films, most notably Monster's Ball (pictured) and Made, but he hasn't starred in anything... yet. Combs' eye is on the prize however and he is, as he told E! this week, "trying to get my black Bruce Willis on." No one quite knows what to make of this statement. Was Combs going for alliteration? Is he a big fan of Die Hard? Is he going to spend ten years and hundreds of thousands of studio dollars hiding the fact that he's losing his hair? Only time will tell. And I, for one, am genuinely looking forward to finding out, if only so that I can learn how to get my white male Toni Morrison on.    Publicist Tales If you thought the Bush administration was a less than reliable source of information, wait until you get a load of personal publicists. Here is the situation: $20 million man, Adam Sandler, is presently shooting a film for Walt Disney Pictures called Bedtime Stories. Sandler also enjoys playing basketball. During a break in filming on Bedtime Stories, Sandler endulged his basketball jones and, during play, managed to break his ankle. This seems like it might pose a problem for Disney and the production of the film itself. There is no conceivable way that I can fathom where having a film’s lead actor on crutches, unable to walk would not hurt things. See photo of Sandler in cast here. Even on My Left Foot this might have caused havoc. However, according to Sandler’s representative, and I quote, "the injury will not affect production". Not one bit. Moving forward…	Classic Quotes "You're awfully clean for someone who likes the cinema so much." - Eva Green hits the nail on the head in Dreamers.    Interview Spotlight: Andy Serkis I did my interview with actor Andy Serkis at the very, very beginning of his promotion of Peter Jackson's King Kong. The movie was coming out in December and I spoke to Serkis in August. In a pleasant change of pace, I got him before he'd managed to come up with his standard, well hashed out answers. As he freely admitted to me, he was looking at our interview as a sort of practice for the gobs of interviews that were yet to come. This is, by far, the best time to talk to anyone. They're fresh, their answers are unique and there's a good chance that they might say something, you know, interesting. (A side note: I don't think I've ever used the three forms of 'there' in the same sentence before without thinking about it. Yeay!) I had two favorite parts of our interview: 1) when Serkis debated about how he would handle people who would reference Kong as a "monkey" and 2) when we talked about how he'd feel if someone stopped him on the street to congratulate him on his performance as Kong. Serkis can presently be seen in The Cottage, available this week. read Andy Serkis' interview Something to Truly Debate The Great Debaters is another inspirational, based-upon-a-true story that details the surprising debate victory of the predominantly black Wiley College over Harvard University in 1935. Produced by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Films, The Great Debaters is a triumphant story of overcoming adversity and of the power of believing in yourself. Oh yeah, and it never happened. This is the problem with movies that are based upon true stories: they can take significant liberties with the actual facts. Was the Wiley College debate team of 1935 good? Yes, there is no question about it. Did they ever debate Harvard in anything? Nope. When Wiley faced off against the previous debate champions, they did so against the debate team from the University of Southern California. According to a source quoted in an article in the New York Post, "The Wiley team never wrote to Harvard, never debated Harvard, never beat Harvard... And no Harvard administrator would have ever referred to the university as an all-white college [as he did in the film] since it had long been integrated [at that time]." Couldn't the filmmakers have just set the climactic battle at USC? 5 Things I Learned This Week 1) There is an actor named Black Thomas. This is example #702 of things a white guy could not pull off. 2) Harrison Ford was once credited as "Jethro the Bus Driver". 3) Megan Fox can take a bad photo. Good lord, can she. 4) Titanic is the world's highest grossing film. It grossed $1.8 billion. The #2 film on the list, The Return of the King grossed $1.1 billion. 5) P. Diddy has been credited with a whopping nine names throughout his career. The list is long and somewhat repetitive: Sean Combs, Sean 'Puffy' Combs, Sean 'Diddy' Combs, Puffy Combs, Puffy, Puff Daddy, P. Diddy, P Diddy (no period), and Diddy. And I'm not counting his "Sean John" clothing line. By the way, this is example #703.
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