When’s the last time moviegoers were as excited as these GTA IV gamers?
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Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily » ‘IRON MAN’ IS SUMMER’S ROCKETMAN: Soars To $100M Weekend, $50M Overseas
Posted on: May 4, 2008
SATURDAY PM: An insider just told me that Marvel’s Iron Man has made at least $100 million for the 3 1/2 days of its opening release in North America. “We’re having a fantastic Saturday,” a source within distributor Paramount relays. “Most movies in this genre fall Friday to Saturday. Not this one!!!” The total wildly exceeded what Marvel and Paramount thought would be the comic book movie’s realistic take from 4,105 theaters during its debut. I’m told the PG-13 action pic also has taken in a monster $50 million overseas from nearly 50 foreign territories.
SATURDAY AM: This is why Hollywood keeps making movies from comic books. Now it’s official: Marvel’s Iron Man opened with $38.5 million at Thursday’s and Friday’s box office for what will be $95 million in total domestic gross for the full 3 1/2 day release (including Thursday night’s $5 million haul from advance screenings in 2,500 theaters, plus Friday- Saturday-and-Sunday’s monster take in 4,105 venues). The PG-13 blockbuster distributed by Paramount logged in No. 1 as the best 2008 film opening, but also shoul finish among the Top 2 or Top 3 summer movies of the year as it kicks off the all-important May through August popcorn season. The $140 million production self-financed by Marvel also broke the record for the second biggest non-sequel opening of all time behind only Spider-Man 1. (With its unconventional leading man Robert Downey Jr — which may be one secret to the film’s success — and director (Elf) Jon Favreau, the pic is the second biggest Marvel comic book movie character behind only Sony’s Spider-Man franchise.) 
“Especially when we’ve had a horrid March and April, this shows people are ready to go to the movies,” an insider says. I understand the Cinemascore was an A, and an A-plus with younger groups ages 18 to 24, and under 25. The movie like most comic book pics understandably skewed more male: I just saw the Cinemascore figures, and that gender gap was wide Friday night: 71% male-29% female filmgoers. (Interestingly, Iron Man insiders cite internal figures claiming it was 60%-40% “which bodes well for female audiences finding the movie and loving it.”) According to Rotten Tomatoes, Iron Man is the best reviewed wide release so far this year — 95% positive reviews — and the best reviewed comic book movie in the website’s (albeit brief) history. Meanwhile, distributor Paramount is milking this monster hit for all it’s worth: it has attached the new trailer for its Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull to the showings of Iron Man.
OVERSEAS: Iron Man opened overseas as early as April 30th. I’m told that, in over 47 international territories, the pic made $30 million total over Wednesday and Thursday. This does not include the UK, where Iron Man debuts today, or Japan, where it opens in September.
The other major movie opening, Sony’s Made Of Honor starring Patrick Dempsey, did respectably considering all the competition: I’m told it opened to $5.6M Friday from 2,729 venues for what should be a $16M FSS.
FRIDAY 9 PM: Sources just told me that Marvel’s Iron Man will make $30-plus million from 4,105 theaters for Friday’s domestic box office gross and should have an $80+ million North American weekend. (One rival studio thinks the pic did $32M Friday and definitely will earn high $80sM if not $90M for the 3-day weekend.) Meanwhile, Thursday night’s take from advance screenings in about 2,500 theaters was a very big $5 million, sources tell me. And impressively that number was reached with almost no specific marketing at all to the preshows. Friday’s total and new weekend projection far exceeded what the studio and distributor hoped (its 3-day FSS estimate was $65M-70M, or $75M for the 3 1/2 days). Iron Man will also mark the biggest movie opening of 2008 as it kicks off the all-important summer popcorn season.
WEEKEND PREDICTION: Latest projections by my box office gurus call for Iron Man to debut with a monster $75 million to $85 million 3-day weekend. That will make it the second best Marvel comic book character opening, second only to Sony’s Spider-Man franchise. According to Rotten Tomatoes, as of noon today, Marvel’s Iron Man is the best reviewed wide release so far this year — 95% positive reviews — and the best reviewed comic book movie in the website’s (albeit brief) history. Nice way to kick off the summer popcorn season and great validation for Marvel’s decision to self-finance its productions. (I’m told Iron Man came in at a cost of around $140M.) Tonight’s showings begin around 8 PM in about 2,500 locations, then the pic rolls out super-sized to 4,105 theaters on Friday through Sunday. The distributor Paramount is still sticking with its $65M-$70M projected opening, “and anything over $70M is a home run.”
The Clean Energy Scam
Posted on: March 29, 2008
A tiny sliver of transitional rain forest is surrounded by hectares of soybean fields in the Mato Grosso state, Brazil.
From his Cessna a mile above the southern Amazon, John Carter looks down on the destruction of the world’s greatest ecological jewel. He watches men converting rain forest into cattle pastures and soybean fields with bulldozers and chains. He sees fires wiping out such gigantic swaths of jungle that scientists now debate the “savannization” of the Amazon. Brazil just announced that deforestation is on track to double this year; Carter, a Texas cowboy with all the subtlety of a chainsaw, says it’s going to get worse fast. “It gives me goose bumps,” says Carter, who founded a nonprofit to promote sustainable ranching on the Amazon frontier. “It’s like witnessing a rape.”
The Amazon was the chic eco-cause of the 1990s, revered as an incomparable storehouse of biodiversity. It’s been overshadowed lately by global warming, but the Amazon rain forest happens also to be an incomparable storehouse of carbon, the very carbon that heats up the planet when it’s released into the atmosphere. Brazil now ranks fourth in the world in carbon emissions, and most of its emissions come from deforestation. Carter is not a man who gets easily spooked–he led a reconnaissance unit in Desert Storm, and I watched him grab a small anaconda with his bare hands in Brazil–but he can sound downright panicky about the future of the forest. “You can’t protect it. There’s too much money to be made tearing it down,” he says. “Out here on the frontier, you really see the market at work.”
This land rush is being accelerated by an unlikely source: biofuels. An explosion in demand for farm-grown fuels has raised global crop prices to record highs, which is spurring a dramatic expansion of Brazilian agriculture, which is invading the Amazon at an increasingly alarming rate.
Propelled by mounting anxieties over soaring oil costs and climate change, biofuels have become the vanguard of the green-tech revolution, the trendy way for politicians and corporations to show they’re serious about finding alternative sources of energy and in the process slowing global warming. The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol–ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter–in the past decade, and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade. Europe has similarly aggressive biofuel mandates and subsidies, and Brazil’s filling stations no longer even offer plain gasoline. Worldwide investment in biofuels rose from $5 billion in 1995 to $38 billion in 2005 and is expected to top $100 billion by 2010, thanks to investors like Richard Branson and George Soros, GE and BP, Ford and Shell, Cargill and the Carlyle Group. Renewable fuels has become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie catchphrases, as unobjectionable as the troops or the middle class.
But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it’s dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline.
Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. The U.N.’s World Food Program says it needs $500 million in additional funding and supplies, calling the rising costs for food nothing less than a global emergency. Soaring corn prices have sparked tortilla riots in Mexico City, and skyrocketing flour prices have destabilized Pakistan, which wasn’t exactly tranquil when flour was affordable.
Biofuels do slightly reduce dependence on imported oil, and the ethanol boom has created rural jobs while enriching some farmers and agribusinesses. But the basic problem with most biofuels is amazingly simple, given that researchers have ignored it until now: using land to grow fuel leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that store enormous amounts of carbon.
Backed by billions in investment capital, this alarming phenomenon is replicating itself around the world. Indonesia has bulldozed and burned so much wilderness to grow palm oil trees for biodiesel that its ranking among the world’s top carbon emitters has surged from 21st to third according to a report by Wetlands International. Malaysia is converting forests into palm oil farms so rapidly that it’s running out of uncultivated land. But most of the damage created by biofuels will be less direct and less obvious. In Brazil, for instance, only a tiny portion of the Amazon is being torn down to grow the sugarcane that fuels most Brazilian cars. More deforestation results from a chain reaction so vast it’s subtle: U.S. farmers are selling one-fifth of their corn to ethanol production, so U.S. soybean farmers are switching to corn, so Brazilian soybean farmers are expanding into cattle pastures, so Brazilian cattlemen are displaced to the Amazon. It’s the remorseless economics of commodities markets. “The price of soybeans goes up,” laments Sandro Menezes, a biologist with Conservation International in Brazil, “and the forest comes down.”
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