Box office update: 'IMMORTALS' slashes competition with $15 million!!!

Could it be? It looks like some Greek gods, a cross-dressing comedian, and a Spanish kitty cat are actually breathing life into the dismal box office!

Relativity’s Tarsem Singh-directed 3-swords-and-sandals action flick Immortals easily topped the box office on Friday, fighting its way to a better-than-expected $15 million. That puts the picture on pace for a $37 million weekend, about half of what 300 opened to in 2007. Still, considering the rut the box office has been in this fall, a $37 million debut is pretty impressive.

In second, Adam Sandler’s latest comedy Jack and Jill laughed up (actually, there probably wasn’t much laughing involved) $9.9 million on its first day. Sony’s Adam Sandler comedy could earn $27 million over the Friday-to-Sunday period, but considering his other films typically open in the $40 million range, Jack and Jill will have to work hard to join the $100 million club.

Puss in Boots finished in third with $9 million. The Shrek spin-off will lose some of its audience to the family-friendly Jack and Jill, but it still has a good shot at passing that picture and reaching second place. In all likelihood, it will earn a similar $27 million.

Brett Ratner’s terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad week gets just a slight bit better thanks to Tower Heist dropping by an alright 40 percent to $4.9 million on Friday. The Eddie Murphy/Ben Stiller comedy may fall by 35 percent for the weekend to $15 million, lifting Tower Heist’s total to $45.5 million.

Rounding out the top 5 is J. Edgar, which earned $4.3 million and looks like it’s headed for an opening right in the same range as Clint Eastwood’s last picture, Hereafter, which found $4.1 million on its first day of wide release and earned $12 million over the entire frame.

Check back tomorrow for the full box office report.

1. Immortals – $15 million

2. Jack and Jill – $9.9 mil

3. Puss in Boots – $9 mil

4. Tower Heist – $4.9 mil

5. J. Edgar – $4.3 mil

THE REVIEW (by Adam Markovitz)

The ''producers of 300'' have gotten high billing in ads for Immortals, another swords-and-sandals mini-epic in which men dressed like Hellenic gay pride paraders wrestle and preen and cross swords (in a perfectly hetero-virile way, of course).

But once you've spent two hours watching amber waves of abs ripple across the screen, you might think bigger credit really ought to go to the actors' personal trainers. After all, it's the size of his pecs — and certainly not his personality — that designates Theseus (Henry Cavill) as this story's hero. He's a stonemason from a small village, and his single definable character trait — a hot temper — only serves to move him from one bicep-flexing fight to another with minimal dialogue in between.

The focus of most of his anger is King Hyperion (Mickey Rourke, chewing the scenery like a four-course meal), a tyrant out to conquer both the earth and Olympus by dint of a magical bow. Helping Theseus fight him are a sensual oracle (Freida Pinto) and the Olympians themselves, including fiery, brawny Zeus (Luke Evans) and fierier, brawnier Poseidon (Kellan Lutz). The gods of Homer and Virgil these ain't; Immortals' shaved-chest-thumping mythology owes more to Men's Health than to Bulfinch's.

Plot machinations ensue, though you won't much care — or understand, since the dialogue is all muttered in a Babel of pan-U.K. accents to underscore its pointlessness. But what saves Immortals as a moviegoing experience is the exuberant, kid-in-a-candy-store virtuosity of its director, former music-video wunderkind Tarsem Singh (The Cell). He has no apparent love or patience for storytelling, but Singh is a visualist on par with Julie Taymor and Tim Burton. He makes images of such overblown, pop-baroque splendor that the eyes have no choice but to gorge. Every landscape is a canvas for cartoon-crazy architecture, every body a mannequin for inhuman costumes, every battle blow a candidate for slo-mo glory. Without any narrative heft, these sights don't last in the mind much longer than they linger on screen. And yet they thrill in short-lived bursts that Singh doles out carefully, keeping pace with the audience's appetite. It's his name that ought to be above the title. B

Source: Inside Movies | Grady Smith