"Cars" Chugging Along

Adam Sandler's dumb new movie (which is almost redundant) opens at #1 with $40 mil. Good -- Sandler makes some interesting small movies (like "Punch Drunk Love") but knows when to get goofy to please his fans. But the big news to me was that "Cars" keeps chugging along. It grossed $22.5 mil and has hit $160 mil. Clearly the movie will hit $200 mil in the US, which is the new $100 mil (the old standard for a blockbuster). How anyone can paint that as a disaster for Disney is beyond me. Sure, the movie cost $120 mil or so and Pixar movies are averaging $250 mil (which is insanely good), but EXPECTING a movie to gross $250 mil is just crazy. And for the critics who think "Superman Returns" wil pummel it: yes, of course, but that's a PG-13 movie (as is "Pirates"). So families with little kids will still see "Cars" as their number one option and that should give it legs. Other critics said Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" was "slowing down" and that it clearly wasn't any "March of the Penguins." Again, this is like comparing every feature film to "Titanic." ("Penguins" was the second biggest theatrically released documentary of all time.) "Inconvenient Truth" is now one of the ten biggest grossing documentaries of all time. It's just hit $9.5 mil, plays on 400+ screens and barely dropped from a week ago. Oh and that other disaster "The Da Vinci Code?" Closing in on $700 mil worldwide. Remember: don't get caught up in opening weekend or second weekend percentage drop figures. The only numbers that matter are the movie's budget and the movie's final worldwide gross.