Correction appended Feb. 10, 2014, 12:50pm The little plastic people in Bricksburg are cheering, and so are the big greedy moguls in Hollywood. The Lego Movie, already acclaimed by critics (95% on Rotten Tomatoes, 82% on Metacritic), broke out like a benign fever across North America, earning a phenomenal $69.1 million, according to preliminary estimates from its ecstatic distributor, Warner Bros. Also exceeding the expectations of the stats swamis was George Clooney’s true-life World War II heist caper The Monuments Men, with $22.7 million. This was the first weekend in nearly five months to see new movies occupying the top two slots; Insidious 2 and The Family pulled off that perfecta on Sept. 13 to 15. A PG 3-D stop-motion and CGI cartoon, The Lego Movie is the all-time top February opening after Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ ($83.8 million in 2004, which would be $112.7 million today). In real dollars, it’s also behind Hannibal ($58 million in 2001, or $85.5 million today).
Consider that Hannibal was the long-awaited sequel to the Oscar-winning blockbuster The Silence of the Lambs, with Anthony Hopkins reprising his role as the world’s most fastidious cannibal. The Gibson film was a bloody remake of the Greatest Story Ever Told, and the only Hollywood blockbuster that could attribute its success to multiple visits by the evangelical community. For a movie about plastic toys to compete with these two behemoths is nothing short of sensational. (MORE: Corliss’s Review of The Lego Movie) The Lego Movie also plants Warner Bros. firmly — and finally! — in the animation game along with Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks, Fox/Blue Sky (Ice Age) and Universal (Despicable Me). Among all animated features ever released in January through March, the Lego opening trails only two films of plummy pedigree: Universal Pictures’ Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax ($70.2 million in 2012, $73.7 million today) and Fox’s Ice Age: The Meltdown ($68 million in 2006, $86.7 million today).
It outgrossed such early-year hits as DreamWorks’ Monsters vs. Aliens, How to Train Your Dragon and The Croods; Fox’s first Ice Age, Horton Hears a Who! Any way you count the cash, Lego is a smash. (MORE: Google Chrome Launches Virtual Lego Land) And its directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, are the new kings of Hollywood. In 2009 they hatched Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs ($243 million worldwide), and three years later the live-action comedy update of the 1980s Johnny Depp TV drama 21 Jump Street ($201 million worldwide). Both films generated sequels, and Warner Bros. is already at work on a Lego follow-up. The new movie earned a rapturous A CinemaScore rating from an audience whose demographics were surprising for an animated feature: 55% male and 59% over 18. And since the picture’s production cost was only about $60 million — less than any of its first-quarter cartoon competitors — it will be in the black by next weekend. (MORE: Corliss’s Review of 21 Jump Street)
We’ll bet Clooney was happy to come in second with The Monuments Men; its $22.7 million take would have made it No. 1 either of the past two weekends. The PG-13-rated World War II adventure — in which Clooney leads a platoon of art-history specialists (Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, etc.) on a mission to save Nazi-held treasures — got slammed by most critics and looked a poor bet to break even on its $70 million budget. But its generous B-plus from CinemaScore suggested the movie connected with audiences in search of a retro thriller for grownups. The opening attraction at the Berlin Film Festival, with Clooney and the gang on hand, The Monuments Men could do more robust business abroad than at home. (MORE: Corliss’s Review of The Monuments Men) In holdover news, Ride Along exceeded the $100 million mark in its fourth week; and Frozen, in its 12th, inched past Despicable Me 2 ($368.7 million to $368.1 million) to become North America’s top-grossing animated feature released in 2013.
The weekend’s one other new wide debut film, Vampire Academy, stumbled to a $4.1 million opening. High school and vampires might have seemed a socko tandem, but audiences didn’t bite. Here are the Sunday estimates of this weekend’s top-grossing pictures in North American theaters, as compiled from various sources: 1. The Lego Movie, $69.1 million, first weekend 2. The Monuments Men, $22.7 million, first weekend 3. Ride Along, $9.4 million; $105.2 million, fourth week 4. Frozen, $6.9 million; $368.7 million, twelfth week 5. That Awkward Moment, $5.3 million; $16.8 million, second week 6. Lone Survivor, $5.3 million; $112.6 million, seventh week 7. Vampire Academy, $4.1 million, first week 8. The Nut Job, $3.8 million; $55.1 million, fourth week 9. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, $3.6 million; $44.5 million, fourth week 10. Labor Day, $3.2 million; $10.2 million, second week Correction: The original version of this story misstated the studio behind Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax.
It is Universal Pictures.Every fan knows Batman’s origin story. No, not the one about Bruce Wayne’s parents dying in Crime Alley. I’m talking about the tale of a gritty urban vigilante who was created in 1939, only to be mercilessly watered down into kid-friendly fluff, culminating in a hyperkitschy 1966 TV show. Ever since then, the story goes, brave creators have fought to make the Dark Knight dark again. For years, everyone I knew believed in this legend. We all looked down on the Adam West version of Batman and sneered at the Joel Schumacher films. I came of age believing that Neal Adams, Frank Miller, and a handful of other comics creators had rescued Batman from a fate worse than death. And that Tim Burton and the team behind Batman: The Animated Series had helped to complete a much-needed rescue operation. Then Christopher Nolan came along more than a decade after them to once again save Batman from his worst enemy: silliness. But I never could have predicted that I would be devouring a new comic based on that 1960s TV Batman, while eagerly awaiting The Lego Batman Movie, the candy-colored spinoff of Lego Movie hitting theaters today.
Somehow, in the past decade I’ve learned that you don’t have to choose between dark, brooding Batman, and goofy, self-mocking Batman. Gotham City is big enough for both. This may seem like an obvious lesson, but it challenged a lifetime of fanatical one-true-Batman-ism. Bruce Timm, who co-created Batman: The Animated Series, fought to bring to life a vision of Batman that was free of of Super Friends-style hijinks. Meanwhile, in theaters, Burton’s Batman and Nolan’s Batman Begins both stripped away much of the candy floss that had started to cling to the character, introducing visions of the Dark Knight to new generations of filmgoers. My own commitment to dark Batman started to change when I realized how insanely fun the tongue-in-cheek Batman: The Brave and the Bold was. The cartoon aired while Nolan was in the middle of his Dark Knight trilogy, and came at a time when the internet was churning out slews of Batman memes, each one celebrating the many different capes this crusader has worn.
Eventually, insisting on one particular vision of Batman seemed perverse. I remember many an intense conversation in comic-book shops about the merits of a Bruce Wayne who had a scowl to go with his cowl. But I wasn’t alone in having a preferred version of Batman—I remember many an intense conversation in comic-book shops about the merits of a Bruce Wayne who had a scowl to go with his cowl. “To many people, insisting on one single Batman as the pure version was very important,” says Will Brooker, author of the Bat-studies books Batman Unmasked and Hunting the Dark Knight. Brooker believes that for some fans, trying to strip Batman of all campiness was an effort to remove the character’s homosexual overtones. But the harder question to answer was why fans felt they had to choose, and why dark Batman often came out on top. And increasingly, says Brooker, the best takes on Batman have been the ones that honor his entire history, from the wartime propaganda of the early 1940s to the zany sci-fi 1950s to the street detective of the 1970s.
Grant Morrison’s run of Batman comics managed to “encompass every often-contradictory Batman within the same figure,” says Brooker. The result was a portrait of “one man, who just had an exceptionally busy and complicated life.” And the Lego Batman Movie version of Bruce Wayne, Brooker says, is actually pretty similar to Morrison’s: In the movie, Lego Batman has been around for 78 years, living through all of the flesh-and-blood character’s historical phases, from World War II serial through the 1966 TV show to the recent movies. Along the way, both the Adam West and the Ben Affleck versions of the character come in for some affectionate mockery. That fun-poking is for the best. With fans and creators able to appreciate the multitiudes Batman contains, they’ve also seen the “serious” Batman taken to some pretty wild extremes—and once Batman gets too dark and violent, the result is actually, well, kind of silly. “The Nolan movies and Batman v Superman pushed the tough-guy Batman so far, they became melodramatic and almost comical,” says Brooker.