Depends on your definition of “cleaning up”
- Cover of Angels & Demons (Robert Langdon)
A bit of pop culture this morning. Ross Douthat, the newly appointed token conservative on the New York Times‘ op-ed page, chimes in on the Dan Brown phenomenon (“Da Vinci Code,” “Angels and Demons”). The entire column seems to be a jeremiad against “post-modern” Christianity and religiosity, which is itself quaint and deserving of fuller discussion. But he starts off with an exaggeration (to put it mildly) in his first sentence:
The movie treatment of his novel, “Angels and Demons,” is cleaning up at the box office this week.
See, the problem is, “Angels and Demons” didn’t “clean up” at the box office at all.
A&D made $46,204,168 in its opening weekend as the only major picture opening this weekend. But “Star Trek,” which opened last weekend, made $43,034,547, only $3 million less than A&D. Compared to other summer releases so far, A&D paled in comparison to the opening weekends of “Star Trek” ($75,204,289) and “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” ($85,058,003).
A&D also paled in comparison to its predecessor, “The DaVinci Code” which made $77,073,388 in its first weekend of release in 2006. In fact, it couldn’t even beat the opening gross for the second “Chronicles of Narnia” which opened on the same weekend in 2008 with $55,034,805.
What’s more, A&D will likely plummet this weekend as it faces stiff competition from the latest “Terminator” release, and the “Night at the Museum” sequel.
With an estimated budget of $150 million, $48 million on opening weekend is hardly “cleaning up.”
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