Ice Age movie and box office

It deserves some qualifiers. To begin with, the U.S. box office for Ice Age has been steady
but not spectacular, so because of that
this will never become the highest-grossing animated film worldwide.
For the foreseeable future, that will continue to be Shrek 2, with over $900 million it total ticket sales. But Ice Age has hit $732 million
which puts it within reach of The Lion King and maybe the third Shrek movie, close to the top 20 films ever made.
But the real story here is the international markets, which comprise an almost unprecedented 75% of all tickets sold for the new Ice Age.
We talked earlier this summer about Sony not investing that much into the U.S. release of Angels & Demons because it knew the real money was overseas; this film has a higher percentage of international box office than even that one.
In fact, it looks like only Mamma Mia! and The Last Sumarai have a greater piece of the pie going to overseas receipts - or overceipts, if you prefer - and even then, it's only by about a percentage point.
The rather unspectacular third Ice Age movie has made almost $185 million in the U.S. and nearly $550 million in all the other territories.
By the time all the figures are totaled, it could make upwards of $600 million around the world. That would put it among the top ten films ever on that list. Incidentally, it has already made nearly $75 million more than The Dark Knight overseas.
Different audiences, I know, but it does show you just how well this one has played around the world. To claim the record for an animated release in foreign markets, it had to pass Finding Nemo, which made $525 million internationally in 2003.

digg stu red del yahoo face spurl blink furl twit tech simpy pro mixx

Film - EXTRACT

For a comedy, Extract is kinda depressing. Understand that wildly dysfunctional characters have become the norm in American comedies, but the characters in Extract give dysfunction a bad name. Not a single person in this ensemble comedy doesn't suffer from colossal stupidity.
Nor does anyone possess a moral compass. So from this contrived situation, writer-director Mike Judge, the creator of "Beavis and Butt-Head" and "King of the Hill," wrings all the yuks he can. Extract might be live action, but it still plays like a cartoon.
Miramax will in turn wring all the box office it can from Extract because there undoubtedly is an audience eager to laugh at dumb people behaving badly.
Even so, it's hard to see how Extract will do more than modest business
with perhaps a larger audience awaiting its debut in home entertainment.
Fiction certainly has its share of characters suffering from neurotic anxieties and mental meltdowns, but usually you understand the circumstances.
In Catch-22 or M*A*S*H, the daily likelihood of death in the theatre of war explains all the craziness. In a Cheech and Chong comedy, no one has to ask what those dudes have been smoking.
But in Extract, nothing explains the major stupidity in and about the workplace of a medium-sized business in an unnamed community that looks like bits of Los Angeles pieced together.
Perhaps something in the water system?
The actual source of the chain of daft events is the sexual allure of Mila Kunis' Cindy, who no one seems to realize is a scheming sociopath. Joel Reynolds (Jason Bateman), the owner of a flavor-extract plant, certainly is smitten with his new temp employee.
His best friend, Dean (Ben Affleck), a substance-abusing bartender, convinces him that to not feel guilty about committing adultery, he should first hire a "gigolo" (Dustin Milligan) to sleep with his wife (Kristen Wiig).
Meanwhile, Cindy has sweet-talked fellow employee Step (Clifton Collins, Jr.), who has suffered a bizarre industrial accident, into filing a huge lawsuit against the company that will bankrupt the firm. (Why the company's insurance agents and their lawyers aren't called in is never explained.) Even when Cindy steals workers' purses, the women assume it can't possibly be that pretty young woman, so it must be the new Latino employee.
About the only thing Cindy can't be blamed for is the fact that the company hires only losers and misfits. You do wonder how the firm still is such a success that General Mills is eyeing it as a possible acquisition.
Not for a single moment does anyone in this film make a good decision. Consequently, you quickly catch on and easily anticipate the bad decisions before they happen.
Judge encourages his actors to overplay their hands.
The worst offender is Affleck, hiding behind a beard and hair that renders him almost unrecognizable. At least that's good thinking.
On the other hand, Bateman and Wiig stay enough in control—they seem almost normal—that you can't quite understand their self-destructive behavior.
Then KISS' Gene Simmons shows up as a bus-bench-advertising personal-injury lawyer who, like all the others, is grounded in no discernible realty.
Behind-the-scenes work is professional but unremarkable.

digg stu red del yahoo face spurl blink furl twit tech simpy pro mixx