Jul 21 2008
The Dark Knight and Hellboy II: A Shame of Timing
Over the weekend, The Dark Knight set three or four records for movie history: biggest midnight showing box office receipts, biggest three-day weekend box-office receipts and maybe some more.
To me personally, that mean that when I went to see the movie at 10 p.m. on a Sunday night, the show was nearly sold out. Friends who had attempted to go to an earlier show were there still at 10 because it was the only show with tickets available.
I got there my standard 35 minutes before the show and had to sit far closer to the screen than I prefer. I also had to sit next to some dorky recent high school graduate who couldn’t keep his mouth shut about who the characters were. It would have been a thoroughly horrible movie going experience (I really like Sunday night generally as I often see the movie with one of two other people) except that the movie was so very good!
I hoped it would be. I thought that it might be. But living up to the hype was going to be hard. Too often, when a movie has been well publicized, the movie itself is something of a let down. I was encouraged when the said Heath Ledger studied The Killing Joke graphic novel as his inspiration for The Joker and when I read Sir Michael Caine saying that his first encounter with Ledger in character had frightened him.
I was encouraged when I heard that Gary Oldman, another actor I deeply respect, had said that Ledger’s performance was Oscar worthy despite the “genre” of the movie.
But I was discouraged when I read that the movie had three villains in it. Shades of Batman and Robin haunted me and I feared that the Nolans had failed the intelligence test for writers of superhero movies. Too many or too few super villains ruin movies.
I think that my hubby hit the nail on the head when he said after the movie that this worked because it was not really a movie about Batman. It was Batman as an antagonist in the story of Harvey Dent. Aaron Eckhart was in many ways the real star of this movie.
That is not intended to denigrate Heath Ledger or Christian Bale. Both, as well as Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhall, Morgan Freeman and of course Oldman, give stellar performances. But this was the story of Harvey Dent and as such Aaron Echkart should have been the star.
I was thrilled to see the initial box office reports indicating what a huge reception the film received. I was also happy to see that Mamma Mia, with a release specifically timed to coincide with The Dark Knight, also set records as the biggest release for a musical. What saddened me was that last week’s number one movie, Hellboy II: The Golden Army sank like a stone, all the way to number 5 and just $10 million in receipts. The shame of this is the timing. At another point in the summer Guillermo del Toro’s wonderful film might have spent weeks as the top box office draw. Instead, it fell below Hancock, a far inferior movie, and Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Clearly, it was a matter of timing. There are only so many action/superhero movie watchers and their movie of choice this week was The Dark Knight. And, as much as I love the new Hellboy movie, the opening week numbers for The Dark Knight are hard to argue against.
Still, I hope that the marketing executives at the studio are smart enough to realize that Hellboy’s second week numbers are not a reflection on the quality of the movie, but are a shame of timing.
