A Dispiriting List of Girl-Targeted Movies That Opened Better Than Whip It
Ellen Page spends the entirety of Whip It trying to escape the beauty contest circuit, but if she'd just submitted to those traditional tropes of teen femininity and won the big tiara in the third act, maybe the movie would have opened to better than $4.8 million this weekend. As the dismal bows of Jennifer's Body and Whip It have proved this fall, the teen girls who turned Twilight into a phenomenon may be powerful, but producers who ignore their desire for submissive romance, pretty dresses, and conventional female leads do so at their own peril. (I'd hate to be attempting a studio sale of rock grrl biopic The Runaways in this climate). Don't believe me? Check out this list of recent films that opened better than Whip It:
Opening Weekend: $5.3 million
Opening Weekend: $7.5 million
Opening Weekend: $6.1 million
Opening Weekend: $9.4 million
Opening Weekend: $7.7 million
Opening Weekend: $6.8 million
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Nice collection of posters from Polanski's bedroom wall!
well it's good to see that there's a context wherein Lindsay Lohan might still be considered a force at the box office. i hope someone sent this to her management.
all those movies sucked as well as their leads (save for mandy moore sometimes)
I never felt more relieved not having heard of 90% of these films.
So...girls would rather Flick or Stick it than Whip it. Duly noted.
(sweet HTML tags.)
This is out of context. Of course the box office returns are going to be low in an economic downturn.
If you replace the roller rink with an ice rink and "beauty pageant" with "Harvard," the plots of Ice Princess and Whip It! are pretty much identical.
...also, I don't recall any of these films being considered huge successes, except maybe Cinderella Story, which was back when Hilary Duff was what Miley Cyrus is today--that is, a gigantic Disney tween star, a market that skews much younger than Whip It! seemed to be aiming for.
Other more successful teen movies include Mean Girls (with the message that acting stupid for a boy is, well, stupid and being catty and bitchy is terrible and there are better, more important things in life, and a main character who completely changes herself to be conventional and fit in and suffers for it).
Don't be so ignorant. Regardless of the current economic situation in our country, movies have been consistently opening to huge ticket sale numbers. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen opened to over 100 million, Up at 68 million, and Star Trek with 75 million.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2009&p=.htm
So it really doesn't matter how low the Dow might dip; the escapism that movies provide Americans will continue to be too alluring to write out of their expenditures. People avoided Whip It not because they are being more frugal, but because there isn't much appeal to Ellen Page dressed as a roller-skating girl scout.
But only one has a Wilson brother in it.
I'm sure The Runaways will do just fine. All they need to do is insert a scene where Joan Jett fights Kate Hudson for the last pair of Manolo Blahniks in Saks.
This. Mean Girls opened way above all of these at 24 mill, and like Whip It, wasn't teen fluff. Also, Stick It doesn't have a submissive romance, dresses, or a conventional girl lead. So being unconventional isn't what killed Whip It.
The guy next to Mandy Moore in the How to Deal movie looks like Mandy Moore.
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