12/09/10

Opening This Weekend: Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third film based on C.S. Lewis’ Christian fantasy series (which has already made well over $1 billion worldwide) will open everywhere. Despite its very cheesy trailer, look for Dawn Treader to take over the No. 1 spot in theaters for a couple of weeks. Also opening wide is The Tourist, a hotly anticipated romantic thriller that pairs Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp for the first time. We’ve seen the trailer and, well, we’re not even a little bit excited. Director Steven Soderbergh’s documentary about minimalist actor/playwright/monologuist Spalding Gray, whom Soderbergh made a film with in 1996 called Gray’s Anatomy, will begin to test in NYC and LA, as will The Company Men, Shoah, The Tempest, The Fighter and Hemingway’s Garden of Eden. Look for I Love You, Phillip Morris, to see a very modest expansion. A number of promising movies should come to town next week, so stay tuned.

ScreenRant: What do movies like Black Swan, Fair Game, The King’s Speech, Night Catches Us, 127 Hours and Nowhere Boy have in common? Well, they’re all cred-nabbing films by loved directors that feature hot actors and fought over scripts. Oh, and they are, of course, also hotly anticipated by critics and cinephile types. They all share one more thing: none are playing in more than 436 theaters in the entire world, some playing in as low as eight (to put that into perspective, the new Harry Potter film is now playing on over 15,000 screens worldwide). So what happened to all the great art house and Oscar season films that were supposed to come out everywhere? Did all the national theater chains hold a secret meeting and agree to ban together and only screen big studio films (Potter, Tangled, Burlesque, etc.) through the end of the year and ignore promising movies like the ones mentioned above? And what about movies like Dogtooth, White Material, Life During Wartime, A Woman, A Gun and a Noodle Shop that would’ve surely seen much wider U.S. releases in past years? Or even Jim Carrey indie comedy I Love You Phillip Morris, Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger and Stephen Frears’ Tamara Drewe? Well, at least we have James L. Brooks’ How Do You Know?, the Coen Brothers’ True Grit, David O. Russell’s The Fighter, Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere (all scheduled to see wide distribution) to look forward to.