So, the story
goes something like this… Last fall actress Reese Witherspoon was getting all
kinds of praise, not only for her Oscar nominated role in “Wild”, but also
because she seems to have turned around what looked like a career
decline.
After a series
of unfunny comedy flops, and soon to hit the dreaded 40-year-old mark for Hollywood
actresses, she formed her own production company to develop worthwhile projects
for herself, resulting in "Wild" and also “Gone Girl,” which she originally
intended to star in, but realized it was much better suited for another actress, and was a huge box office hit that got everyone talking.
So how did
Witherspoon top her big comeback? She did it with her latest project "Hot
Pursuit" which opened his weekend, and which is exactly the kind of lame comedy
that nearly sank her career. If that isn’t the definition of ironic, then I
don’t know what is.
If it had a great script with a funny, original premise, that I could understand. But "Hot
Pursuit" just takes a worn out plot, recycles tired old comic set ups to little
effect, with obvious jokes that weren’t even funny the first 100 times they were
used. Maybe it was a really great script originally that somehow got screwed up
after endless rewrites and post-production problems. It’s happened before with
a lot of other films. And opening with $13.3 million, also taking into
consideration all the competition coming in the next few
weeks, "Hot Pursuit" won’t be around much longer.
Evidently, MGM knew what they had since they tried to hold off any advance media
screenings until the last minute – always a sign of trouble. Compare that to "Mad
Max: Fury Road" which Warners has been screening for the media over the last two
weeks before it comes out next Friday, because they know they’ve got a winner, which we’ll find out next week.
"The Avengers: Age of Ultron" was of course the No.1 film again his weekend, with $77 million, which is almost a 60% drop-off from last weekend, but that was expected. To
date, the film has made $772 million worldwide. Yet, at this stage, it’s still
unlikely that the film will beat "Furious 7," which has grossed almost $1.5
billion thus far.
Disney’s live
action "Cinderella" is still holding on in the top ten, with almost $200 million domestically, and $504 million worldwide. No surprise that the studio has more live action film
versions of their most popular animated films currently in the works. Par for
the course for studios, to beat an idea to death.
You know,
just lust like comic book movies…
