Holy Shit: IRON MAN pulled in a weekend take of $201 Million.
If it’s true: insane. My guess would’ve been way, way off.
Fact is that it’s a comic book franchise not too many people are familiar with (far less so than SPIDER MAN, FANTASTIC FOUR, SUPERMAN, or X-MEN) without directors people are familiar with (Brett Ratner, Sam Rami, Brian Singer) and really, only two stars that have been worth a decent box office take (Paltrow and Terrance Howard). What’s exciting about this is that Hollywood is finally coming around to putting together old-school gigantic action tentpole blockbusters that are good.
Anyone that works in film can tell you that putting Jon Favreau at the helm of a $135M film was a risk, especially for Marvel Studios, for whom this is their first self-financed film. I think Favreau’s been developing this project for quite a while, even before Marvel Studios re-acquired the rights to the property. Either way, he must’ve done quite a bit of legwork to convince them. It’s paid off. Huge victory for a broad-shouldered, scrappy college dropout from Queens whose parents were teachers. Awesome.
But the story of Iron Man gets even better, of course, because of Robert Downey Jr. A fuckup in every way possible, Downey (a high school dropout) had big shoes to fill from word-one: his father made one of the classic comedies in the canon of American film. He had half of his salary on Gothika withheld by Joel Silver to ensure that he’d complete the film; that was only five years ago. This weekend, he just had the second best non-sequel opening behind SPIDER MAN…and Tobey Maguire’s never been nominated for an Oscar, before. Clearly, Downey’s future is looking bright.
Also, it’s kind of nice to not hear anyone talking about Judd Apatow for a few days.