LOS ANGELES – An alien invasion will likely descend on the weekend’s box office, with Sony’s ‘Battle: Los Angeles’ set to debut at the top of the chart in the high $20m range. Feeling more like a summer-style blockbuster than a mid-March offering, the film stars Aaron Eckhart as the leader of a Marine platoon with the unenviable task of fending off a massive offensive by super angry aliens hell-bent on colonising earth.
Harkening back to the sci-fi earth invasion movies of the late 1950’s, ‘Battle: Los Angeles’ puts a modern spin on a tried and true genre that will draw plenty of young males to the multiplex for relentless mayhem. Paramount had a solid $38.1m No.1 debut last weekend with its animated ‘Rango,’ featuring the voice of Johnny Depp, and the film should pull in a respectable second-weekend take of just over $20m. In a big-screen version of the classic fairy tale, Warner Bros.’ ‘Red Riding Hood’ casts Amanda Seyfried as the heroine and Gary Oldman in yet another villainous turn in this teen angst film directed by genre veteran Catherine Hardwicke, who also helmed the first ‘Twilight’ movie.
Featuring an attractive young cast and enough young lust, romance and adventure to excite its target female audience, ‘Red Riding Hood’ is likely to generate somewhere between $15 million and $18 million in its debut weekend. Universal’s ‘The Adjustment Bureau,’ which opened last weekend with a solid $21.1m, should realise a fairly modest drop that will earn it around $12m and a likely fourth-place finish on its second weekend out.
