Well, as long as we're waxing nostalgic about the box office... Variety's thorough reporting mentioned last year's flop at this time,
Jack the Giant Slayer... so he's a slayer who also happens to be giant? I think audiences were confused... anyway, let's wind the clocks back to Oscar weekend 1997, where a little movie called
Liar Liar came out. I guess that would've been the year that Saul Zaentz's trophy cup overflowed. And so, star of
Liar Liar Jim Carrey got to present one of the Oscars that year. Here's the joke he told: "How was your weekend? Mine was good!" See,
Liar Liar opened with $30 million... something like that. Not quite
Ace Ventura 2 money, but still, not bad for a film that marked Carrey's and Shadyac's transition from Hollywood juveniles to Hollywood grown-ups. No more of
Ace Ventura 1 scrappy high-jinks, it's time to make a film you won't be too ashamed of to show on NBC prime time, what have you. Let's say, 10% crude jokes, 90% sentimentality. Percentages that Irving Thalberg would be happy with.
...drat! You let me down again, IMDb charts. I gotta go to Variety for my info fix. And so, Liam Neeson does it again for Natasha with his latest Luc Besson-esque thriller called
Non-Stop. Neeson and director Jaume Collet-Serra... wow! I typed that out right the first time! Just double checked... they collaborated previously on 2011's
Unknown. At least the posters are slightly different. Neeson's still clutching a gun, though. Now I could sit here and talk about
Flightplan and
Red Eye and the whole Conde Nast subgenre, but... yawn. It's
Taken 3 we care about, right?
Meanwhile, it's onward Christian filmmakers with
Son of God at #2, making more money in one weekend than all the films of the
Kendricks combined. Oh, s'z'nap! They wanted to get Brad Pitt to play Jesus, but went with the younger, Portugal-born equivalent instead. You know how it is.
Okay, time to renew my subscription to Variety.com. Come back soon, IMDb Charts!
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