-By Warner Todd Huston
Entertainment Weekly’s Joshua Rich reported on the weekend’s box office returns for the latest releases on October 19 to let us all in on Hollywood’s successes and failures, because, you know, Hollywood is important and all. We find that the Chihuahua movie is still going like gangbusters ($70 million in three weeks) and the horrid movie “Max Payne” led the weekend’s receipts with $18 million. Oliver Stone’s slamfest “W,” though, earned a disappointing fourth place on its debut weekend.
So, what was EW’s excuse for this disappointing finish? According to Rich, “W” is failing at the box office because of “tough economic times.” It’s curious, though, that people have spent $70 million on the Chihuahua movie in these same “tough economic times” — and let us not forget that the latest Batman movie has made over $300 million. Still, the excuse for the fourth place finish for Stone’s pseudo-biopic is “tough economic times,” just the same.
But, Rich’s excuse is a claim that even Entertainment Weekly itself has recently disputed, at least as far as the box office goes. Only a few weeks ago, the weekend that right-wing comedy “An American Carol” debuted, the same Box Office Report column said that the “economy may be tanking, but the box office remains healthy, with probably the only year-on-year metric that’s seen an uptick.”
Amazingly, but a few weeks later, EW’s Joshua Rich suddenly finds that these “tough economic times” are responsible for the failure of the movie that maligns nearly everyone in the Bush family?
Continue reading “Entertainment Weekly: Stone’s ‘W’ Flick Disappoints… Because of ‘Tough’ Economy?”