So the Men in Black finally returned after a ten years hiatus.
The movie was a troubled production that had difficulty making it to the finish line, it received mixed reviews, and went up against the box office juggernaut of The Avengers, which has been the number one movie in the country for three weeks straight.
So now the box office results are in, and Men In Black made $70 million in four days, and over $200 million worldwide.
MIB 3also knocked the Avengers off the top of the charts, although there is a nagging feeling it could have done much better. Let the box office punditry begin…
As Variety tells us, “While MIB and Avengers did their best to prop up the weekend, totals still trailed 2011’s Memorial Day weekend by a considerable 32%. That’s because last year benefited from tow big openers: The Hangover Part 2 collected $103 million in four days, while Kung Fu Panda 2 grossed nearly $61 million.”
Deadline headlined its report, “Summer Slump?,” and as Nikki Finke reports, “A lot was riding on this weekend’s worldwide totals for Will Smith and Sony. But Memorial Weekend newcomer Men In Black 3 is now the 5th major studio release that has underperformed domestically at the start of summer 2012.”
And the Daily Beast/Newsweek tells us that Men in Black 3 “stands as one of the most difficult movie productions in recent Hollywood history, a massively expensive exercise in inefficiency and and infighting,” to the point where the studio thought of pulling the plug.
There was no finished script when production started, “the Hollywood equivalent of erecting a skyscraper without a finished blueprint,” but how many times has this happened with major blockbusters? (With movies like Battleship, you still wonder where the script is). And of course, more reports of diva behavior on Will Smith’s part, the producers trying to take the movie over from under the director, and the usual Hollywood nonsense you hear about practically every big budget movie there is.
Not exactly news here, and you can probably substitute the title for any other big Hollywood blockbuster in exchange of Men in Black 3, and the story would be exactly the same. Recently, Vulture expressed optimism that with Battleship tanking it will make Hollywood take stock, and stop throwing away so much money on big budget monstrosities, but this is indeed wishful thinking.
As the Beast reports, Men in Black 2 received terrible reviews and made a ton of dough regardless, so as long as this continues to make sense to the powers that be, expect more crisis filled blockbusters, where the studios keep hoping and praying the ends will justify the means along with the cost.
