'Quantum of Solace' sets franchise record

"Quantum of Solace"

Best opening ever for a Bond film in North America

By Carl DiOrio

Critics seemed shaken by its nonstop mayhem, but moviegoers were stirred to support "Quantum of Solace" in franchise-record numbers during the weekend as the James Bond film bowed with an estimated $70.4 million in domestic grosses.

A 22nd installment in the lucrative 007 franchise, now the joint property of Sony and MGM, the Daniel Craig starrer opened two frames earlier in many foreign territories and totes a $252 million international cume. Sony is handling physical distribution of the film worldwide, but MGM was a 50-50 participant in its $200 million in production costs.

The previous-best domestic debut for a Bond film was the $47.1 million registered by 2002's "Die Another Day." The franchise's top domestic theatrical run has been charted by "Solace" predecessor "Casino Royale," which rung up $167.4 million in U.S. and Canadian coin after unspooling in November 2006.

"Solace," Craig's second outing as 007, had been set to bow Nov. 7 domestically. But studio executives decided to hold it back a week after Warner Bros. moved "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" from November to July, so the Sony-MGM film could debut closer to the lucrative Thanksgiving period.

The outsized domestic opening for "Solace" exceeded even the high end of prerelease projections and was aided by positive global buzz. Craig's industry star has received an immense boost in the process as moviegoers clearly have taken to him in the iconic Bond role.

"Audiences have embraced him, and domestic audiences were champing at the bit for the film," Sony distribution president Rory Bruer said. "It's certainly gratifying, to say the least."

The Marc Forster-helmed film played to audiences comprising 54% males, with 58% of patrons age 25 and older.

In reviews, many critics lamented "Solace's" dark tone and said its action profile compared more closely to rugged Robert Ludlum-inspired films like 2002's "The Bourne Identity" than to a typical Ian Fleming action-adventure.

It's worth noting, then, that "Solace" opened bigger than any installment in Universal's "Bourne" series, for which the best opening came with 2007's "The Bourne Ultimatum" at $69.3 million. "Ultimatum" ultimately fetched $227.5 million domestically and $442.8 million worldwide.

In addition, "Solace" opened bigger than any other non-summer movie this year.

Industrywide, the weekend's $154 million in collective boxoffice marked a 48% improvement on the same frame a year earlier, according to data service Nielsen EDI.

Seasonal boxoffice, at $1.52 billion, is up 9% over fall 2007.

Year to date, 2008 is 4% ahead of the same portion of last year, at $8.62 billion. That's a big-enough spurt to make it possible for '08 to outpace last year's 12-month admissions because this year's lead in grosses appears ample enough to account for ticket-price increases.

Elsewhere during the weekend, three wide releases marked sophomore sessions with varying degrees of success.

The family comedy "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa," from DreamWorks Animation and Paramount, notched a relatively modest 43% decline from its opening grosses to register $36.1 million in second place and pump its 10-day cume to $118 million.

Universal's R-rated comedy "Role Models" slipped only 39% to $11.7 million in third place, netting a $38.1 million cume.

And the R-rated laugher "Soul Men," from MGM and Dimension, tumbled 55% to $2.4 million in seventh place, netting a $9.4 million cume.

Looking ahead, two major wide releases square off Friday, six days before Thanksgiving.

Disney unspools its animated comedy "Bolt," including hundreds of playdates in 3-D auditoriums, and Summit Entertainment sends out the teens-and-tweens vampire film "Twilight." The former will seek to sway family moviegoers from "Madagascar 2," and the latter is doing notably well in online ticket presales.

Bond Comes to Your iPhone

Craig Rubens

iPhone apps might some day be the gold mine for advertising. In the meanwhile, we are seeing the emergence of a new trend: iPhone apps as ads. Hollywood studios are the first ones to react and using free applications to promote its movies. We are totally loving the new app for the latest Bond flick, Quantum of Solace. More than just a micro-site, the Bond application lets you watch the movie trailers and read up about the movie. It also pushes you out to the iTunes music store if you want to you want to purchase Jack White’s throbbing theme song from the film. Of course others have more immersive apps.

The Dark Knight, for example has come up with a way to add some Joker-style graffiti to photos of your friends. Use the touch screen to drag and rotate elements and then save and send them as you like. Bolt, Disney’s forthcoming animated canine adventure has released an app which is essentially a free stripped down Super Monkey game for a very subtle hand.

All three apps, however, lack the seemingly most obvious feature - the ability to actually purchase tickets for the movie. That much imagination would be too much to ask from Hollywood, but we are happy that they are thinking about ways to promote their movies on screens that matter.

Quantum of Solace Is the Perfect Bond Movie

gizmodo.com — The latest Bond is the perfect Bond Movie. Yes. It is. In fact, Quantum of Solace is not only the perfect Bond movie, it's the best Bond movie ever, period. Even surpassing Casino Royale —and I mean both the Craig's one and the original Peter Sellers, David Niven, and Woody Allen's delirium

Spoilers ahead....

Review: Quantum of Solace Is the Perfect Bond Movie

'Quantum of Solace' Makes $200 Mill Even Before US Premiere

Quantum of Solace' to run uncontested

For the Bond sequel, the question is how big it will bow

By Carl DiOrio

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You know there has been a seismic shift in the global marketplace when a studio tentpole can ring up $200 million before its U.S. bow.


That's the likelihood with this weekend's lone domestic opener, the James Bond film "Quantum of Solace" from Sony and MGM, which registered $180 million internationally by Tuesday and was ringing up foreign coin at a daily clip of $10 million this week. The Daniel Craig starrer has been playing -- oh has it been playing -- in dozens of countries worldwide before its domestic debut in a major reversal of the industry norm.

Sony is handling physical distribution of "Solace" worldwide, but MGM was a 50-50 participant in its $200 million production costs. So the partners crafted the unusual global strategy jointly, expanding on the franchise's traditional U.K.-first rollout to unspool the 22nd Bond film in an unprecedented 60 foreign territories before its Friday release in the U.S. and Canada.

The domestic rollout includes showtimes at 12:01 a.m. Friday in more than 1,600 locations.

"The Bond movies belong to the world," Sony domestic distribution president Rory Bruer said. "They're popular around the world, so getting the dates right -- whether domestic or elsewhere -- was particularly important."

Initially, "Solace" was to bow Nov. 7 in the U.S. and Canada, with only the U.K. and a handful of markets getting the film first. But when Warner Bros. bounced "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" from November to July, executives at Sony and MGM decided to hold back the Bond film one week domestically to open "Solace" closer to the lucrative Thanksgiving period.

Bruer said the film's established international success should help boost must-see interest among domestic moviegoers.

"I certainly believe the buzz is out there, with regard to what it's doing throughout the world," he said. "The world is a much smaller place, and that resonates back to the U.S. as well."

"Solace" has yet to unspool in several overseas markets and won't travel to Japan until January. But its early bow in China and other piracy-prone territories has helped keep unauthorized copies of "Solace" from circulating on the Internet or elsewhere, Bruer said.

"All that has shown up is an unwatchable version on the Internet of really, really poor quality," Bruer said.

Partly because of the global buildup to the stateside bow, the Marc Forster-helmed "Solace" appears likely to mount the biggest domestic Bond opening ever, well outpacing the $47.1 million debut for 2002's "Die Another Day." Many believe a $50 million-plus opening is likely, with a first-weekend haul of $60 million doable if moviegoing proves robust this weekend.

Meanwhile, it bears watching how films held over from recent domestic openings hold up under the 007 assault.

The family comedy "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa" from DreamWorks Animation and Paramount will seek as much moolah as possible before Disney bows its animated feature "Bolt" next weekend. Animated films tend to play longer than the average release, but the overlap could cause some tumult.

Elsewhere, Universal has a pair of holdover titles targeting different core audiences than "Solace." Yet each could get jostled in a marketplace that will get only more competitive with each successive frame.



Universal's R-rated comedy "Role Models" grossed $19.2 million in an overachieving bow and could see a big second-session drop if younger demographics flock to see Bond. The Angelina Jolie starrer "Changeling" -- which rung up $7.3 million during its second session in wide release for a $20.6 million cume -- might need a leggy theatrical run if the Clint Eastwood-helmed period drama is to attract notable awards consideration.

Similarly, though it's a foregone conclusion that "Solace" will open well, it's more of an unknown how it will hold up domestically once holiday releases starting hitting multiplexes.

Reviews of the film haven't been as solid as they were for 2006's "Casino Royale" -- which marked Craig's first assignment as 007 -- and that Bond installment proved a far greater hit internationally than in the U.S. and Canada. "Royale" rung up $40.8 million during its first weekend in domestic release, en route to $167.4 million U.S. domestically and $594.2 million in worldwide boxoffice.

Two big films bow during the Nov. 21 frame -- the first session in the holiday boxoffice season that runs through New Year's weekend -- with Disney's "Bolt" and Summit Entertainment's vampire release "Twilight" representing a possible boxoffice combo of $80 million or more. The following Wednesday, three more tentpoles open wide: Fox's epic adventure "Australia," Lionsgate's action sequel "Transporter 3" and Warner Bros.' seasonal comedy "Four Christmases."

If the blur of titles isn't enough to illustrate the holidays' hyper-competitiveness, consider this: "Twilight" was outselling "Solace" almost 2-to-1 this week in presales by MovieTickets.com.

Of course, the core teens and tweens fan base for "Twilight" is more likely to buy tickets online than that for a Bond film. Execs at Sony and MGM also can take solace that their film has marked 50% more sellouts than the Summit film -- though "Twilight" still has another week ring up its presales.

The Most Ludicrous James Bond Supervillain Plots Of All Time

The villain's evil scheme in the new James Bond film, Quantum Of Solace, sounds pretty demented. But it can't possibly be as crack-addled as Blofeld's monstrous plan in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, as seen in this clip. Blofeld, played by Telly Savalas, wants to blackmail the world by hypnotizing a woman to love chickens. It totally would have worked, too. Bond films are known for their ridiculous Rube Goldberg villain schemes — here's our list of the most brain-dead, including a few Quantum spoilers.

What makes that clip even more awesome is that the woman has just had sex with James Bond, and now she's being hypnotized to adore chickens. That's got to be someone's exact fetish, somewhere on the internet.

So here are the most insane Bond villain schemes, starting with the one above and ending with Quantum Of Solace:

Blofeld's chicken allegy/virus scheme. Actually, Blofeld's scheme in OHMSS is a little more complicated than I let on above. He's pretending to be an allergy doctor, and he's gathered a whole bunch of beautiful allergic women in bikinis and harem pants. They're allergic to various things, mostly food items, and Blofeld is curing their allergies with the hypnotic power of his smooth silky Kojak voice. But he's not just curing their allergies — he's also brainwashing them to deliver the deadly Omega virus to plants or animals, on his command. The Omega virus causes instant sterility and spreads like wildfire. So, for example, if chicken lady (from the clip) infects her chickens with the Omega virus, we'll never hatch another chicken again, anywhere in the world. It'll be like 28 Chickens Later. How does Bond foil this dastardly scheme? I just re-watched this movie, and I'm still not sure. But it involves lugeing. And dancing bears. Best. Bond. Movie. Ever.

Goldfinger's nerve-gas-nuclear-gold scheme. The early Bold films often seem to revolve around nukes. For example, Dr. No plans to use a nuclear reactor to deflect American missile launches off course, eventually including the moon rocket, with the help of an evil geologist. (Mwa ha ha ha.) But Goldfinger's scheme is sheer elegance in its bug-brainedness. He wants to nerve gas all the soldiers guarding the gold depository at Fort Knox, and then set off a nuclear bomb inside the gold reserve, irradiating all the gold and making his own stash more valuable. Mostly, though, he just likes to laser people in the crotch.

Blofeld's spaceship kidnappings. In You Only Live Twice, Blofeld is at it again. This time, the white-cat-loving maniac is launching his own spaceship to space-nap U.S. and Russian spaceships. He also continues the food theme by disguising his liquid oxygen rocket fuel under the label LOX, thus making everyone think it's smoked salmon. Sheer genius!

Blofeld's shine-on-you-crazy-diamond satellite. You can't keep Ernst Stavro Blofeld down. He decides to build a deadly satellite and use it to attack Washington, D.C. Just launching a satellite and building a space-based weapons system would be fancy enough for most supervillains, but not the now-Vegas-based Blofeld. He makes the whole thing out of diamonds. Except for the coolant system, which is platinum. Liberace is his launch technician. Oh, and the satellite is controlled by cassette tape, which is the same way Blofeld controls his chicken-loving women slaves. He loves his Dolby noise reduction.

Scaramanga uses solar power for EVIL. Count Dooku has three nipples. (I just love saying that.) And he's building a deadly SOLAR GUN which harnesses the power of solar energy. He has a solar reactor, which is like a nuclear reactor, but SOLAR. Too bad Miss Goodnight accidentally makes the solar reactor go critical, which is like a solar flare, only on Earth.

Stromberg's Atlantis. Some guy who doesn't have a white cat or extra nipples wants to build his own undersea kingdom, in a seabase named Atlantis, in the Spy Who Loved Me. There's also nuclear submarines and stuff.

Hugo Drax's space-flower-power attack. Now this is more like it. In Moonraker, zillionaire Nazi Hugo Drax has crazy disco facial hair, and he wants to create a new master race of perfect blonde people in Speedos. So he builds a ton of space shuttles and finds some rare South American orchid that can be distilled into a poison that he can spray from the air, to commit flowery genocide. That's the kind of crazy supervillain lateral thinking we like around here.

Christopher Walken wants to smash Google. You'd expect Christopher Walken to have a totally derango plan, but his scheme in A View To A Kill is surprisingly dull. He just wants to set off some bombs and cause some earthquakes, destroying Silicon Valley and giving himself a monopoly on the zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Oh sorry. He doesn't even hypnotize Larry Ellison into deploying an exploding goat at the right moment or anything. Very disappointing.

Rupert Murdoch's crazy war agenda. In Tomorrow Never Dies, Jonathan Pryce plays Eliot Carver, a media baron who wants to start a war between the world's two great superpowers: China and Britain. To this end, he sinks a British ship in Chinese waters and steals its deadly payload to start an attack against the Chinese government that will eliminate politicians who are opposed to giving his media company broadcast rights. Plus he thinks World War III will be good for ratings.

Colonel Moon's solar-power minefield detonator. In the recent Bond films, satellite weapons have figured prominently, including GoldenEye's EMP weapon. But we don't get a truly bugfuck satellite scheme until 2002's Die Another Day, the last Pierce Brosnan film. Colonel Moon, an evil North Korean, disguises himself as a Brit named Gustav Graves, and builds a satellite called Icarus that can harness solar energy and then focus it to help grow crops. (Notice a running theme here: Solar power? Always EBIL.) In reality, Graves wants to use the satellite to blow up a ton of mines in the minefield between North and South Korea, allowing the North Koreans to take over. Because, of course, the minefield is the only thing preventing a North Korean takeover. Genius!

The faux-Gore eco-resort water grab. You know what else is evil, besides solar energy? Water management. In Quantum Of Solace, apparently the villain, Greene (Matthieu Amalric), is a fake environmentalist. He builds a fancy Eco-Hotel as a front for his vicious schemes. And he plans to help overthrow the government of a small South American country, in return for an apparently barren piece of land. But then it turns out that land secretly allows him to control most of South America's water supply. How does that work? I'm dying to see the movie and find out.

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"Quantum of Solace is the best James Bond film in a decade!"

Screen Rant’s Niall Browne reviews Quantum of Solace

As a life long James Bond fan I always look forward to new adventures from the super-spy. My very first cinematic memory is watching Roger Moore’s final outing as Bond in A View To A Kill, and my teenage years and early twenties were filled with Pierce Brosnan’s daring-do.

When the Broccoli family ditched Brosnan in favor of the younger, more rugged Daniel Craig I was a bit annoyed (to say the least). Although I was a tad skeptical that Daniel Craig had what it took to slip into the tuxedo, I will admit that I was more worried about EON’s idea to reboot Bond for the Bourne generation. Over the years the character of James Bond has been constantly reinvented, without having to start all over again.

In my opinion Casino Royale was an adequate beginning for a harsher and more realistic Bond, but its bloated running time; generic soundtrack and tacked-on finale left me hoping that the next film in the series would deliver the type of James Bond film that I wanted.

So… how does Quantum of Solace measure up?

It surpasses its predecessor in almost every way and delivers the best Bond film in over a decade.

Shorter and more action packed, Quantum of Solace is a James Bond film for the new millennium. Unlike Brosnan’s swan song Die Another Day, the CGI is limited, and unlike Casino Royale the film doesn’t try to be too hip and trendy. From the pulsating opening car chase - you know that you are watching Bond, and like the older movies in the series you feel that it is the end of another adventure (it is) and not a piece of grandstanding from the second unit and stunt departments.

Picking up mere minutes after Royale’s climax the film hits the ground running (literally) and delivers action sequence after action sequence. Don’t worry though, unlike many action movies today this doesn’t feel like sensory overload - just damn good entertainment.

The plot is simple: Bond wants to discover more about the mysterious Quantum organization following his capture of Mr White. He also wants to get revenge for the death of his one true love Vesper from the previous film. Jet-setting across the Atlantic he finds that rogue environmentalist Mr Greene (Mathieu Amalric) has an affiliation with the evil group and whilst tailing Greene he meets Camille - a beautiful but deadly killer who wants revenge on one of Greene’s associates.

It feels like Marc Forster went into directing Quantum of Solace with a checklist of greatest hits from other Bond movies: car chase - check; boat chase - check; roof top chase - check. There are a couple more I could add but I don’t want to spoil the film - in any case you can bet they’re in there. What’s miraculous is that it all feels fresh and very real.

Forster also manages to bring back Bond’s weapon of choice - the Walther PPK for the first time in years. There’s even a death of a character that harkens back to Goldfinger. It’s all classic Bond, but it all feels relevant, despite what Mike Myers says.

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