This will be of interest mainly to those folks who obsessively follow box-office returns (you know who you are), but a few weeks ago, Hugh Hewitt boldly predicted that The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe would outgross King Kong not only overall, but on Kong‘s opening weekend. This was pure folly, as any BoxOfficeMojo-devotee could have informed Hewitt, and Jonathan Last took great pleasure in explaining just why the prediction was so unlikely to come true.
Well, Jonathan was right – but since the opening weekend, Aslan has been clawing his way back to the top. Kong barely outgrossed Narnia over Christmas weekend, and since then the C.S. Lewis adaptation has pulled back into the lead, making money hand over paw (sorry, sorry).
I’m a little surprised by this turn, in part because in spite of being smack in the middle of the target demographic for Philip Anschutz’s big project, I actually preferred Kong to Narnia (my complaints about the latter are here), though both were miles from perfect. (Steve Sailer has it right – there were two hours of a great movie in Kong, but unfortunately the film was three hours long.) But it’s still gratifying that Narnia‘s doing well, if only because it means they’ll film the later books – and hopefully, as with the Harry Potter movies, the adaptations will get better as they go along.
Unfortunately, the one they’ve started on, Prince Caspian, is one of the weakest of the seven – and the one after that, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, is pretty dull as well. (If there’s any Narnia book where the religious allegory gets in the way of the story, it’s Dawn Treader.) And it would be a shame if audience interest dries up before they get around to The Horse and His Boy, or The Magician’s Nephew, or my personal favorite, The Silver Chair. (I’m hoping for Jeremy Irons as Puddleglum . . .)
– posted by Ross
The Dish 