By Daniel Frankel
LOS ANGELES (TheWrap) - Closing out the Summer of the Lesser-Known Super Hero, Paramount and Marvel will debut "Captain America: The First Avenger" in 3,715 theaters this weekend.
Tracking is solid for the Joe Johnston-directed 3D film, which stars Chris Evans in the title role and arrives with a reasonable-for-its-genre production budget of around $140 million.
Paramount officials are expecting a first-weekend gross somewhere between $55 million to $65 million -- roughly somewhere between where Fox's "X-Men: United" opened in early June ($55.1 million) and where the last Marvel/Paramount collaboration, "Thor," started in May ($65.7 million).
Opening wide alongside "Captain America," Sony's romantic comedy "Friends With Benefits" will further ponder the age-old "can sex friends stay best friends" conundrum, with box-office watchers projecting an opening around $20 million. The R-rated comedy was directed by Will Gluck ("Easy A"), stars Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis, and cost around $34 million to produce.
Limited debuts this weekend will include Mike Cahill's Sundance hit "Another Earth," which Fox Searchlight will open in four locations.
Oh, and there's also a holdover that's coming off the biggest domestic, foreign and global starts in cinematic history: "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2," which should decline steeply from its humongous $169.2 million North American premiere last weekend.
"Certainly, there's competition when you come into a marketplace that already has a movie that has set two or three records," noted Don Harris, general manager of distribution for Paramount.
Huge "Potter" openings, however, are usually followed by weekend-to-weekend drops in the 60 percent-plus range, with the franchise's rabid fans rushing out to see the movie during the first weekend.
With that in mind, "Captain America" -- which comes in with a decent 71 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, as of mid-day Thursday -- should win the weekend.
Among males under 25, the film is scoring 92 percent total awareness, according to the latest surveys from research firm NRG, with 59 percent of young dudes listing "definite interest" in seeing the film, and a solid 20 percent describing it as their first choice to see next time they buy a movie ticket.
That's comparable to the 94 percent awareness, 57 percent definite interest and 18 percent first choice NRG scores from the least of this summer's superhero movies, Warner's "The Green Lantern," right before it opened to a disappointing $53.2 million in June, so tracking might not be all it's cracked up to be.
With the major studios launching or rebooting a range of comic properties this summer -- Thor, X-Men, Green Lantern, Captain America/The Avengers -- that are familiar to comic fans but maybe not as much to mainstream audiences as the triumvirate of Superman, Batman and Spider-Man, there have been some successes.
"Thor," for example, has grossed $445.7 million to date at the global box office and paved the way for a sequel; and "X-Men: First Class" has taken in a respectable $346.8 million worldwide while breathing creative life back into a decade-old Fox franchise.
None of these films, however, have sparked the moviegoer's imagination -- and wallet -- like the film that inspired their gestation, Marvel/Paramount's 2008 revelation, "Iron Man."
Grossing $585.2 million worldwide, "Iron Man" spawned a 2010 sequel that grossed even more ($622.1 million), giving rise to the notion that, if a so-called "second-tier" superhero like Iron Man can make it big, so can any other crime fighter in a tight-fitting suit.
This discussion certainly took place at Disney's corporate offices in Burbank two years ago, right before the Mouse paid $4 billion to acquire Marvel.
With so many superheroes crowding the multiplex this summer, and none of their expensive films reaching the lofty, and perhaps, somewhat unreasonable to expect, bar of $500 million globally, there is growing speculation within the movie business that the market might be tiring of the genre. At least just a bit.
"The era of the superhero franchise flick is fading," one studio research executive said to TheWrap Thursday.
Of course, we'll check back on July 20 next year, when Warner and Christopher Nolan debut "The Dark Knight Rises" to kick the tires on that notion. Or, we'll gauge it when Sony reboots "Spider-Man" next July, or when Warner launches its Superman reboot, "Man of Steel" in 2013.
If Batman, Superman or Spider-man can't gross more than $500 million globally, probably no one in tights can.
As for this weekend's rom-com debut, Sony should make out fine on "Friends With Benefits," if director Gluck's limited track record continues to bare itself out. ("Easy A" grossed $75 million last year on a budget of $8 million.)
Scoring a 57 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, "Friends With Benefits" is scoring 91 percent total awareness among females under 25, according to NRG, with 40 percent definite interest and 10 percent reporting it as their first choice.
For what it's worth, Paramount plundered similar narrative ground earlier this year with the Ivan Reitman-directed "No Strings Attached" (which paired Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman), coming away with a solid $147.8 million global performance on a modest production spend of $25 million.
Actor Chris Evans had plenty of experience starring in comic-book movies such as Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and The Losers, and even Marvel movies, playing the Human Torch in two
Fantastic Fourmovies.
So when he was offered the chance to don the cowl and shield for
Marvel Studios' Captain America: The First Avenger, he was at first reluctant. The 30-year-old actor says he was put off by both the commitment the project required - he was being asked to sign a six-picture deal that could take as long as 10 years to complete - and by the impact such a high-profile role could have on his lifestyle.
"I just wasn't 100 percent positive that my end game was to be a gigantic movie star, and if you're not positive about what you're working towards, it's hard when someone says, 'Sign a 10-year deal,'" says Evans. "I've managed over ten years to make movies that for the most part I like and have a good time making them, but they come and go and I can still go to a ball game and I can still go to the grocery store and lead a pretty normal life and that's a big thing for me."
Evans says he at first felt that turning down the role was the right decision for him, but later reconsidered his motivation.
"I kept talking to more friends and family about what I should do, and I had some really good friends of mine who said, 'You know, Chris ... if you are scared of something, then you should push yourself right into it. ... Whether the movie bombs or succeeds, this is exactly what you should be doing,' and I just did a 180. All of a sudden it made perfect sense that this is exactly what I should do."
Having taken the role, Evans says he has no regrets. "Halfway through the filming of Captain America, I realized this was the right decision," he said. "The reason it was such a difficult decision is because the film itself in a vacuum was fantastic. I loved the character, I loved the script, I love the director, I love the producer, I love all the people behind it. So once I could get past my own insecure bullshit, it's been a great experience."
Preparing for the role involved an intense, two-hours-a-day workout and diet regimen that Evans describes as "brutal." But the final result was worth the hard work, he says.
"No matter how long a list you could create of the negatives, the positives trump it," he says. "Let's be real: I make movies. I'm giving interviews, I put on a shield, and I get paid a lot of money to run around and make believe."
One of the more interesting visual effects tricks in the movie is making Evans looks small and skinny to play Steve Rogers before he becomes Captain America. The actor says it was easy for him to identify with skinny Steve.
"It was a bumpy road for me growing up. I was a very skinny guy. I did theater, I went to acting camp," he says. "I lived half my life in tights and tap shoes."
Despite having had experience doing a musical, Evans told filmmakers he was pleased that the film's musical sequence didn't require him to sing or dance.
Evans says he particularly liked a sequence shot in an underwater tank in which Steve Rogers attacks a submarine.
"That was a really fun week of shooting. We had to film in this giant tank and it was just really cool for me," he says. Scuba tanks were on hand and removed for filming and quickly brought back once the director called cut. "You're underwater for a long time. It was cool and different and I liked the way that little sequence turned out."
The costume also turned out to be a high point for Evans, who says he wanted to take the whole thing home with him, but Marvel vetoed it. Evans says he wears a new, more modern costume in Avengers, but was mum on the details. "It's cool," he says.
Evans says he's having a great time working on his next outing as Captain America, in the still-shooting Avengers. Evans says he has very high hopes for the film and gives director Joss Whedon high marks for pulling off so complicated a movie.
"He doesn't have an easy job trying to bring all these people together, and not only just these superheroes, but these actors, and he's doing a phenomenal job," he says.
Evans says he's enjoying the change of pace on Avengers, where he's only one of several superheroes and not required to carry the movie as much as he does on Captain America.
"The shooting schedule is a lot nicer!" Evans says, with a laugh. "With Captain America, you're working every day. ... That's the one good thing about the six-picture deal, is we'll be able to pinball back and forth from an incredible amount of responsibility and workload to a shared responsibility. I can only imagine when Avengers comes around, I think, for the most part, you guys are going to want to talk to Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson or Mark Ruffalo, and I'll be able to take a little bit of a back seat, which I'm really looking forward to. It's a different experience. Avengers is much more relaxed."
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"We believed that the test, carried out at an hour when the US military satellite could detect it, was aimed at showcasing its missile threats," Yonhap quoted the official as saying.
"We believed that the test, carried out at an hour when the US military satellite could detect it, was aimed at showcasing its missile threats," Yonhap quoted the official as saying.
