Leatherheads, sure, but which ones?

By Steven Zeitchik

Now that all the tackling, sacking and interception puns have been exhausted (for the moment), what really happened at the box-office this weekend?

Most outlets seemed to present the results, with a showdown between a star-light movie in its second weekend and a Clooney-heavy movie in its first, as a sad indicator of the current state of Clooney stock.

Blogs and pundits heaped on he-who-made-the-Caesar-cut famous, and that was before his "box-office woes deepened," as Reuters put it, with word that "Nim"s Island" actually finished above "Leatherheads" when all receipts were tallied.

Some examples: (We'd link but we decided to save you the clicks. Our pleasure.)

--"The Hollywood hunk’s new football comedy was beaten by Kate Bosworth’s casino thriller, '21.'"

--"George Clooney, a giant in his own mind and much beloved by powerful people in Hollywood, launched another bomb over the weekend."

--"'Leatherheads' couldn't beat 21 at the weekend box office, even though 21 lost almost 40% of its audience from last week and is clearly rubbish."

--And something close to clever, from Anglo site ContactMusic.com -- "George Clooney may have wanted to seek treatment in the E.R. over the weekend as he suffered a nasty beating at the box office." (This one we'll give you.)

But all the obituaries seemed more unnecessarily dramatic than a soapy plotline about Doug and Carol from back in the day.

First, Clooney hasn't opened a movie in a decade. Apart from the "Ocean's" pics -- which the presence of Damon and Pitt render useless as evidence -- no Clooney-anchored movie in recent memory has cracked $13 million in its first weekend of wide release. "The Good German?" "Michael Clayton?" "Intolerable Cruelty?

Talent wants to work with him, men want to be him, women want to be with him. But box office just isn'this thing. Not to mention that this film was somethng of an anomaly. (What's that you say? A period sports-comedy with elements not seen in U.S. film in decades? And it didn't work?! Impossible.)

Much has been made of how the movie lost to "21," as though somehow George Clooney is now less of a draw than a few off-suit number cards. But there's another criterion to examine here beyond actors' bankability.

The last three major football movies -- "Invincible," "We Are Marshall" and "The Gridiron Gang"-- opened to an average of $13.3 million, roughly the same as "Leatherheads" earned this week.

The last three gambling movies ("Smokin' Aces," "Casino Royale" and "Two for the Money"), meanwhile, averaged nearly $15 million in their second wide weekend -- pretty much the same total as "21" did in its second weekend.

So "Leatherheads" and "21" followed exactly the same pattern other films in their respective genres have followed for years. On the shock scale, then, the "21"-"Leatherheads" 'beatdown' strikes us as about as remarkable as us coming back from a weekend in Vegas down a few bills.

Or our football team coughing up the ball at the goal line.

Comments

[Leatherheads Fan]

I enjoyed Leatherheads...classic George Clooney produced by George Clooney.