KNIGHT & DAY opens with just $3.4 million
Which is even less than the very lowest expectations.
As expected, the confused looking $100 million summer comedy/actioner Knight & Day is D.O.A., opening to a pitiful $3.8 million in the U.S. And that my friends, is that. The honeymoon of the dancing, MTV audience lovin' Tom Cruise in a fat suit, probably the most embarrassing parody act of any A-lister in recent memory -is well and truly over. The parody that in and of itself became a parody of Cruise attempting to clutch ever so tightly to his first significant connection with audiences in years, has accounted for nothing in the end, and question marks will continue to hang over the Cruisemeister's head as to whether he is capable of still being a box office draw in this industry. Unless things dramatically pick up over the weekend, the movie should end up with around $25 million on Monday morning. That's around $5 million less than the low-estimates we reported yesterday (Nikke Finke has quoted a rival studio exec that it's 'a number below even the most evil estimates') and it's the kind of figure that will get Paramount execs sweating over the budget of Mission Impossible 4. Will the fallout of Knight & Day be a $150 million sized fourth Ethan Hunt adventure turning swiftly into a $80 million vehicle, with Cruise now a 50/50 lead with an upstart protege, who can carry the franchise on in the future?