It looks like Mike was on to something when he asked if Speed Racer would be this year’s first official Flopbuster. We reported late Friday night that the number for Speed Racer weren’t looking good. A lot depended on the Saturday numbers, but they weren’t good either.

The WB went on to embarrass themselves on Sunday by overestimating their box office take by nearly $2M. They were estimating Speed Racer had grossed around $20.5M which put them just over What Happens In Vegas for second place. When the final studio figures came out yesterday, however, Speed Racer fell to third with a take of only $18.5M while What Happens In Vegas finished with $20.1M.

To say that Speed Racer is a colossal disappointment would be the understatement of the year. People have been trying to get this movie made for years. They finally got it made, by a pair of star directors no less, only to see the movie tank in it’s opening weekend. Overseas numbers weren’t nearly as high as the studio had hoped either. To make matters even worse, this weekend will bring The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian as direct competition and that film is already tracking to hit somewhere in the mid-$60 to $70 million range. Speed Racer is definitely going to have a hard time recouping its cost.

A film that’s not going to have a hard time recouping its cost is Iron Man which went on to score another $51.2M over the weekend dropping only 48% from last week (which is good considering how much business it did the first week). The cumulative total for Iron Man has soared to $177.8M already making it the top grossing film of 2008 by surpassing the $150.7M that Horton Hears A Who has collected over the last two months.

In the second week of our summer blockbuster season, Speed Racer is looking like it could be a flop. Right now it’s tracking on Rotten Tomates with a 34%…egads. My wife said USA Today gave it 1.5 out of 4 stars.

Now, the Cap’n can back me up on this, but I am certainly not surprised by this. I told him on Monday I was planning on writing an article about how I thought it might not do well. In fact, over a week ago in our Summer Box Office predictions article, I didn’t even include the movie in my Top 10.

I had zero desire to see this film once I started seeing more and more trailers for it. I never got into Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or Cool World, and the scenes I saw in the Speed Racer previews with real actors in the middle of CGI effects made me think of those two movies.

I guess it’s part of why the new Star Wars films annoyed me. CGI is cool, I love it, but nothing can replace “real” stuff. George Lucas started thinking that he could paint an entire canvas exactly how he wanted out of CGI, and not ruin the integrity of his movies.

But he was wrong. All those special effects and computerized characters just left us disconnected. Jar Jar Binks? Really?

And seeing the racing scenes in Speed Racer just looks like a computer game with Emile Hirsch’s head stuck on a body.

Anyways…I’m really curious to see how much money Speed Racer will make. I could look like an idiot on Monday after writing this, because a lot of the time bad reviews can have ZERO effect on what moviegoers want to see.

Do you still want to see it after hearing the 34%? Do you ever care about reviews? Do you watch movies based solely on your own interest, without listening to what others say?

The summer movie season got started with a bang as Iron Man exceeded expectations and managed to gross a stunning estimate of $100.8M in ticket sales over the Friday-to-Sunday period, good enough for the tenth largest opening of all-time and the second highest ever for a non-sequel after the $114.8M of 2002′s Marvel Comics sibling Spider-Man.

The film began it’s run with advanced showings at 8 p.m. on Thursday night which grossed an impressive $3.5M in the four hour period before midnight when the official Friday launch started. Added to the weekend gross this amounted to a gargantuan $104.3M in just over three days easily beating out industry (and my own) expectations which were in the $70-90M range. The comic book actioner easily led the box office to the biggest weekend of the year and accounted for two-thirds of all business in the top ten. The film saturated the marketplace this weekend, averaged a stellar $24,543 from 4,105 theaters and an estimated 9,000+ prints.

Overseas box office was almost as generous to the comic book hero. Iron Man invaded 57 territories this weekend and made off with an incredible $96.8M putting the global launch at a humongous $201M since the first international openings on Wednesday. With a reported budget between $140M and $180M, Iron Man should have no trouble recouping its negative cost.

As far as Marvel characters go, only Spider Man has seen a better franchise debut with the first film grossing what would be around $140M in today’s dollars. Adjusting for inflation, opening weekends for other first installments of popular Marvel comics fall much shorter than Iron Man with 2000′s X-Men pulling in $71M, 2003′s The Hulk making $73M, and 2005′s The Fantastic Four pulling in $62M.

Paramount, who distributed the film, is undoubtedly happy as Iron Man was the second largest debut in company history trailing only the $121.6M of last May’s animated sequel Shrek The Third that it released for DreamWorks. The studio’s previous high for a live-action film was with last July’s Transformers (another DreamWorks film) which opened to a Friday-to-Sunday gross of $70.5M after a mid-week debut.

Despite doing so well on opening weekend, Iron Man has indicators that it could have decent legs. Critics and fans alike have overwhelming praised the film. It is currently scoring an unheard of 94% on RottenTomatoes.com which is the best of any wide release this year and is the best of any super hero film EVER. Exit polls by CinemaScore also indicate fans are extremely impressed with the film. It is scoring a fantastic A grade making Iron Man one of the few films that scores highly with both critics and ticket buyers alike. Next weekend will likely tell the tale of how far the film is likely to climb but $250M is well within reach and seems quite likely.

Were you one of the many people who saw the film this weekend? What did you think? Is this the best action hero film ever? Is it better than Spider Man?

Led by the voice talents of Jim Carrey and Steve Carell, the film opened in 3,954 locations and averaged a healthy $11,406 per theater. The film generated the fourth best March opening ever behind 300 ($70.9M), Ice Age: The Meltdown ($68M), and the original Ice Age ($46.3M). Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! also landed the fifth largest opening in history for a G-rated film.

“It’s a who-mongous opening,” Fox senior VP of distribution Chris Aronson said. “Blue Sky has made a film that makes you feel like you are immersed in the pages of Dr. Seuss’ world. It is colorful and vibrant, and so true to his work.

The film, based on Dr. Seuss’ 1954 book of the same name, cost roughly $85 million to produce and marks Jim Carrey’s first starring voice role in an animated film. Industry insiders were are abuzz about the fact that the film nearly matched the opening of Ice Age despite its G rating. Generally speaking, G-rated films can be risky as older kids and teens sometimes see these films as being more for children. Horton, however, saw 47% of its audience come from non-family with teens being the largest segment of that percentage (40%) putting this Fox film on par with Disney/Pixar films.

Disney and Pixar, of course, have been the exception to the rule. Their films generally appeal to all audiences regardless of rating. Disney/Pixar, in fact, boasts the top four G-rated animated films in terms of opening weekend: Finding Nemo ($70.2 million), Monsters, Inc. ($62.6 million), Cars ($60.1 million) and Ratatouille ($47 million). All except Monsters, Inc., which debuted in November, opened in the summer.

Horton, however, couldn’t match the opening of the Dr. Seuss/Jim Carrey starrer Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which opened to $55.1 million in 2000. Horton did beat Mike Myers starrer Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat, which debuted to $38.3 million. Neither of those two Dr. Seuss films were animated.

Well, it appears the sequel could get made since the movie “jumped” all over the competition this past weekend.

Opening on Thursday, and including the President’s Day holiday weekend, Jumper pulled in just over $38 million in the United States, with a reported $28 million internationally in 30 countries.

That’s a $66 million bonanza for Doug Liman, who has inexplicably struck gold again after hits with the Bourne films and Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I suspect the poor reviews may hurt it next week, but who knows…some people just love these kinds of movies and don’t care about the lack of good storytelling, so it could continue to make money.

Now that a sequel is likely in the works, Liman has already told Collider some inside secrets on what it could be about and what other things “jumping” involves:

“this power can be used to leave this planet, this power can be used ultimately to go back in time, this power can be used if you go and work for the government you’d be the ultimate Jason Bourne.”

“The kind of jumping that we’re showing in the movie which is a kind of worm hole jump which is why those scars are left behind, if you can travel through space through a worm hole from a scientific Einstein point of view, you could also travel through time…I’ve left the door open to time travel because of the specific kind of teleportation that I chose to portray in this film”

Well, as I said before, the whole idea behind the film rocked and this additional stuff could really be cool. My only hope is that the sequel somehow improves on the original and is a good movie.

If you think about it though…teleporting, time travel…these guys have some major powers, no wonder the Paladin are jealous and want them dead.

Source: Dark Horizons