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Antichrist Reigns at Box Office
It was the best omen for The Omen: Ringing cash registers.
The horror remake, which built its ad campaign around its mark-of-the-devil opening date, debuted Tuesday (aka 6/6/6) with a strong $12.6 million.
The take prompted WLNS.com, the Website for the Lansing, Michigan, TV station, to proclaim: "The Omen Becomes Largest Opening Movie in History."
Actually, The Omen isn't even the biggest opening in Liev Schreiber's history, per the stats at BoxOfficeMojo.com. (That would be Scream 3, at $34.7 million, which admittedly is hardly what historians would classify as a "Liev Schreiber movie.")
The $12.6 million also doesn't come close to securing The Omen a place on Exhibitor Relations' list of the all-time 50 biggest openings. (By comparison, number one-ranked Spider-Man collected $114.8 million on its first day back in 2002; number 50-ranked Jurassic Park III scared up $50.8 million back in 2001.)
This said, The Omen did distinguish itself with the highest-grossing Tuesday ever, topping the not too shabby likes of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King ($12.5 million in 2003) and Independence Day ($11.1 million in 1996).
Score one for 6/6/6.
"It was the most obvious marketing device to use," Exhibitor Relations' Paul Dergarabedian said Thursday. "But it certainly worked."
Starring Schreiber and Julia Stiles in roles occupied in the 1976 original by Gregory Peck and Lee Remick, The Omen redo also became the latest movie to defy movie reviewers.
According to RottenTomatoes.com, the review-tracking site, The Omen generated 73 "rotten" reviews, and only 33 good ones. ("Who knew Armageddon could be this dull?" asked the Arizona Republic.) The movie's overall Tomatometer score: 31 percent.
The bad showing put The Omen in good company with The Break-Up (31 percent Tomatometer reading) and The Da Vinci Code (23 percent), two other recent movies that were scorned by critics, and embraced by the box-office public.
"It's almost become the rule, not the exception, that critics and audiences disagree," Dergarabedian said.
Still, Dergarabedian believed "there's no way" The Omen will finish its first weekend atop the box office over Cars, the latest CGI-animated comedy from the critic-friendly filmmakers at Pixar, opening Friday.
"The devil would have to have a hand in that [The Omen beating Cars,]" Dergarabedian said.
Currently, the 2006 summer box office is lagging 1.2 percent behind the much maligned 2005 summer box office, per Exhibitor Relations. But outside perhaps of the executive suites where Poisedon was green-lighted, the panic button remains unpushed. For the overall year, movie grosses are up 5 percent over 2005.
Another good omen for Hollywood.
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