I’m in the middle of some big stuff you’ll be seeing here before too long, so this is going to be an extremely short version of my usual long-winded pre-weekend box office previews.
Basically, this is a tricky weekend when it’s hard to see a clear box office favorite. It could be the remake of Alan Parker’s 1980 musical drama, “Fame“; it could be the Bruce Willis/Radha Mitchell virtual living science fiction flick “Surrogates” (a topic much on my mind as I work on a very long post about this movie); it could be a second #1 weekend for “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.” It almost certainly won’t be a second sci-fi flick, a horror/space opera with Dennis Quaid that was withheld from critics, “Pandorum.” Dave McNary of Variety goes out on a limb to say that “Surrogates” will win the weekend with something in the low twenty millions, but jolly Carl DiOrio of THR is honestly equivocal while leaning on his imaginary car horn. He’s probably not wrong when he says there’s just an awful lot of material out there chasing a limited number of autumn filmgoers. We shall see.
