Spielberg To Do Box-Office Battle with… Spielberg
By
October 14, 2010
NEXT WINTER: ONE MAN. TWO MOVIES. ONE WEEK.
We don’t envy anyone who directs a film that opens the same week as a new Steven Spielberg movie. And we especially don’t envy anyone in that position during the holiday film season, when families get sick of talking to each other and spend copious amounts of money at the movies instead.
So we’re interested to see what will happen during next year’s holiday season, when two Spielberg releases are slated to go head-to-head. It was announced this morning that Spielberg’s War Horse, a DreamWorks/Disney release based on a 1982 children’s novel of the same name, will be released on December 28, 2011. That’s five days after the scheduled release of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, Spielberg’s Paramount adaptation of three books in Hergé’s beloved series.
The situation is complicated somewhat by the fact that these are both kid-friendly films; it’s not like Spielberg is putting E.T. up against Munich, where the audiences would be fairly distinct. We’re guessing families will choose one film or the other to see, and our money’s on Tintin: it draws on a well-established brand, it’s in 3-D, it has a $135 million budget, and some identifiable big names (Jamie Bell, Simon Pegg, Daniel Craig) are involved. John Williams is doing the score for both, naturally.
