Bruce Willis takes on Leonardo DiCaprio at the weekend box office in North America as three restricted movies vie for adult audiences.

The buddy-cop movie “Cop Out,” starring Willis and Tracy Morgan, opens Friday along with the similarly R-rated horror remake “The Crazies.”

Warner Bros.’ “Buddy Cop” likely will duel for first place with DiCaprio’s “Shutter Island,” which opened at No. 1 last weekend with $41.1 million. The Paramount suspense thriller has prospects of fetching as much as $20 million this time.

But Warners distribution president Dan Fellman said director Kevin Smith’s comedy has at least a shot at copping weekend bragging rights. “It’s going to be a competitive weekend,” he said.

Prerelease tracking surveys show that “Cop” holds strongest appeal among older men. That overlaps a bit with at least a portion of the broad base of support for “Island.”

“The Crazies,” a remake of George Romero’s 1973 horror film, targets younger demos, so it might overlap with “Island” but not as much with “Cop.” At midweek, tracking showed the Overture Films release headed for a bow in the midteen millions.  Read the rest of this entry »

The future is here, and it looks like Bruce Willis in a bad wig. You might have missed Surrogates when it opened this past September, since its opening weekend only pulled in $15M or so — I guess the combination of Bruce Willis + action doesn’t carry the weight it once did. Quite frankly, you didn’t miss that much. While the script flirts with plenty of promising ideas, they’re largely ignored in favor of standard action clichés and Willis glowering a lot. Still, there’s a bit of fun to be had, and if you’d like to watch Bruce Willis save us all from gorgeous, dead-eyed robots, Surrogates hits Blu-ray and DVD January 26th.

Willis stars as FBI agent Tom Greer, policing a near future where nearly everyone lives their life by proxy through idealized robot avatars. You can do anything you want without fear of injury, be anyone or anything you like, but not everyone is crazy about this brave new world. After the destruction of two avatars kills their human operators as well, Greer stumbles upon a conspiracy that threatens the whole world. To make matters worse, Greer’s own avatar is soon destroyed, leaving him overwhelmed at having to deal with the world first-hand for the first time in years.   Read the rest of this entry »

Director Jonathan Mostow likens his new movie to a mirror for people to see which way they are heading

MOVIES based on graphic novels have a niche market and, lately, quite a few have made it to the big screen and become popular. The latest is Surrogates, which is based on the graphic novel by Robert Venditti and Brett ­Weldele.

The movie is set in the near future where human-like robotic surrogates go out and work and socialise while the real humans control their ­look-alikes from the comfort of their home,
Crime rates have fallen ­drastically for some reason and people even get to decide what their surrogates look like, opting for perfect versions of ­themselves.

All seems hunky-dory until two surrogates are destroyed and, even more shocking, the hosts of these surrogates also end up dead, despite well-placed safety measures.

FBI agent Thomas Greer (Bruce Willis) and his partner, Jennifer Peters (Radha Mitchell), discover a serial killer is on the loose and he possesses a ­powerful weapon that can bypass the surrogates’ safety features.   Read the rest of this entry »

Patrick Kevin Day interviews some of the top talent behind the camera in Hollywood to find out how the achieved the movie magic we all see on the screen. His Scene Stealer feature (along with Liesl Bradner’s series of Wizards of Hollywood posts) are intriguing glimpses in the EFX world and you can read more of them here. — Geoff Boucher

In order to make 54-year-old Bruce Willis’ surrogate robot look like a man in his mid-30s in the sci-fi film “Surrogates,” Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor Mark Stetson oversaw some work worthy of a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon.  Read the rest of this entry »

Director Jonathan Mostow’s new sci-fi thriller Surrogates, said Alonso Duralde MSNBC.com, “flirts with big ideas” about “the dangers of technology on the human soul, and the government’s control over electronic communications.” Centering on a rare murder in a futuristic world where most people stay at home and live their lives through android surrogates, this film, starring Bruce Willis, “is consistently entertaining,” and “a much cooler examination of virtual living than the recent Gamer.”

Surrogates is “a fairly clean, tight film that looks great,” said Jeffrey M. Anderson in Cinematical, and it contains “the requisite number of car crashes and helicopter explosions.” But it’s really “more of a thriller than a cautionary tale, and it doesn’t go very deep in either direction.” And “ironically,” Surrogates (watch the trailer) is “missing” the “human element—the movie has no concept that some people might see both the good and the bad in the surrogates.”  Read the rest of this entry »

1. “Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs” ($5.6 million)
2. “Surrogates” ($5 million)
3. “Fame” ($3.5 million)
4. “The Informant!” ($2 million)
5. “Pandorum” ($1.6 million)

If the Bruce Willis-starring comic book movie “Surrogates” had one obstacle to overcome this weekend, it was “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,” the Sony Pictures Animation film that reigned supreme over last weekend’s box office. Truly, it’s a difficult decision for moviegoers — experience a world filled with robotic analogues that can do and see anything you wish them to, or behold the spectacle of delectable food products raining gloriously upon your face. In the end, it looks like taste buds just barely won the battle.  Read the rest of this entry »