Christmas comes early but AUSTRALIA needs Oscar help

by Matt Holmes

Audiences were more ready for the Christmas holiday than I expected. The awful looking and loaded with on set problems between it's co-stars Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn, festive rom-com FOUR CHRISTMASES made a massive $31 million over the weekend, that's $46.7 million Wednesday to Sunday for Warner Bros' newly owned New Line Cinema. ForWitherspoon, it's her biggest opening since SWEET HOME ALABAMA in 2002 and the movie propels Vince Vaughnback to normality after the slight mis-fire that was FRED CLAUS.

1 Four Christmases (2008) $46.7M $46.7M 2 Twilight (2008/I) $39.5M $120M 3 Bolt (2008) $36M $66.9M 4 Quantum of Solace (2008) $28.1M $142M 5 Australia (2008) $20M $20M 6 Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008) $19.6M $160M 7 Transporter 3 (2008) $18.5M $18.5M 8 Role Models (2008) $7.81M $57.9M 9 The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008) $2.19M $5.16M 10 Milk (2008) $1.87M $1.87M Though it really needed an opening like this. Vaughn and Witherspoon are two of the highest paid actors in the business, this rom-com was made for a huge $80 million (which can't have gone on the special effects) which no doubt will include nice paychecks for the supporting players Sissy Spacek, Robert Duvall, John Favreau and Jon Voight. Indie director Seth Gordon (THE KING OF KONG) who makes his debut studio movie here, will hopefully have now made enough money for himself to pursue more challenging work in the future. TWILIGHT has now made $119.7 million worldwide (it cost only $37 million to make) and unsurprisingly the sequel NEW MOON has been touted this week to begin filming in February. Opening Wednesday were the Oscar contenders AUSTRALIA ($20 million.... which has a long way to go to earn back it's $120 million budget and needs a miracle word of mouth) and MILK which took a cool $1.6 million playing on just 36 theatres. The movie is one of the favourites for the Best Picture Academy Award at the Oscars this year. Another high profile release this week was TRANSPORTER 3 which opened in 7th and it's $18.5 million gross is not wonderful when you think that is for five full days of release. source - coming soon
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Matt Holmes is the co-founder of What Culture, formerly known as Obsessed With Film. He has been blogging about pop culture and entertainment since 2006 and has written over 10,000 articles.