Thanksgiving Box Office--The Disney Version

By now, the Friday after Thanksgiving, it's perfectly plain that Disney's Enchanted is heading for weekend numbers that will have the headline writers reaching for the thesaurus to check out synonyms for its title.

A socko Wednesday of $8.1 million, followed by $6.8 million on Turkey Day, meant there's a good chance that over the five-day weekend it should be within hailing distance of $60 million. That number--or anything over $46 million--would put it as second only to Toy Story 2 in the all-time rankings of films performing across the five-day Thanksgiving stretch. (With Monday morning's estimate of $50 million, this seems to be the case.)

The long November holiday has historically been very good to Disney; Enchanted's ascension to the category will give it eight of the top nine performers in that slot. That kind of running start will give it a chance to play through to Christmas, and the dubious honor of running into juggernauts like Sweeney Todd and Charlie Wilson's War. (Just as Enchanted buffeted the downward-sliding Warner Bros.' Beowulf and its most obvious competition, Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, from Fox Walden.)

"Enchanted is one of those wonderful movies," says Disney head of distribution Chuck Viane, making it clear he's talking about the fun he had taking his six-year-old granddaughter to it as well as it obvious commercial punch, "That's going to be a four quadrant movie and that, as you could tell by the reviews, is going to play to everybody."

Not quite buried in that 3,600-screen onslaught, but perhaps getting less attention than it's quietly earned, is Disney's earlier entrant, the Steve Carrell starrer Dan in Real Life, which opened October 26 to an $11.8-million weekend, and has held as few pictures do by dropping by in percentages in the twenties, rather than the more typical forties and fifties, for a cumulative take of $37 million as it entered the long weekend.

"I always felt," says Dan Producer Brad Epstein, who's been minding the film's fortunes since it came in to Disney while he worked as a production exec there under Nina Jacobsen, "Like people would love the movie once they saw it, as the exit polls have proven. My big concern was that it's a human comedy, not that gross-out kind of comedy that you can easily market--so it was always a challenge getting this movie across."

Epstein, who had converted from in-house exec to a producing deal on the lot not long after Jacobsen left, signed off on the poster showing Carrell's head planted on a stack of pancakes out of faith in the Disney marketers, and in the avidity Jacobsen's replacement, Oren Aviv, has always shown for the project. (Epstein had been scouting locations in Rhode Island when the word came his female boss was out--but got immediate assurance from Aviv that the project, with Peter Hedges reworking the script fairly tenderly from Pierce Gardner's original, would stay on track with the studio. (Hedges, author of the novel and screenplay for 1993's What's Eating Gilbert Grape, also directed 2003's Pieces of April.)

Nonetheless, Epstein didn't know it would find its audience, as it opened in under 2,000 theaters, until it happened: "Oh I was gonna slit my wrists on Thursday when [audience forecasting consultants] NRG had it tracked at 6 to 8 million; it's hard movie to track in a way-- I think the movie held a bit of a mystery as to what it was."

Epstein, a Southern Californian who climbed the ladder from making shakes for Who's That Girl director Jamie Foley to a lengthy spell at Robert DeNiro's Tribeca Films, (where he'd employed Hedges to work on the company's About A Boy) had come back west via an offer from Jacobsen after the life-changing events of 9/11 --watching both hijacked jets zoom past his apartment on North Moore Street just blocks from the twin towers. (He was on the roof for the second one, which passed close enough for him to feel the heat. He supervised Ladder 49 as a labor of love after getting to know the firemen he helped feed as a volunteer in the weeks following the tragedy.)

Epstein's now got a locked script for a romantic comedy called Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, scheduled to shoot at the beginning of next year with, with Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Garner and a second project with a filmable script that he'd nonetheless love to improve if the writers' strike would only end. Other fare on his Panther Films ("The names I wanted like Mayhem and Bedlam were already taken, and I was stuck in traffic on the phone with my accountant, when he told me I had to come up with a name for the paperwork ---just as a truck with a panther passed by.")

Along with Viane, he's hoping Dan, which cost $24 million to make, can ride its exemplary word of mouth past $50 million and with its stable mate Enchanted, hang around well into December.

Short term, Viane is watching to see if Dan can use the word of mouth to march through the weekend with even less than the manageable drops its been taking:

That is always the dream of movies over an extended holiday like this--to try to replicate the weekend before. I think what making the legs so strong on this movie is you have repeat viewers--even though it's a movie that's in search of its first $50 million, there are still people going back for seconds and thirds. [Monday's estimates showed his wish coming true as the film's five-day total of around $4.7 million boosted it narrowly over the previous, three-day weekend's total.]

I think this is a movie that we could have spoiled it if we just ran out there with 3,000 theaters think it would have been seen and off the screen and by allowing some breathing room it has been able to stand in there and hold its own.

Viane, who tries his best to keep his exhibitors on Dan's side by reminding them of its low drops and the slot it might fill in their "portfolio", says, "We believe we will be able to hang around till Christmas, but then, unfortunately, all the behemoths come in and they chew up the space. Even this [Thanksgiving] weekend is a very difficult one for us, because there are 13,500 screens needed just for the films that open this Friday; so if you take a universe of 36,000 first run screens, over a third of all screens have just changed their product line. So the competition is tremendous."

(Dane Cook, Juliette Binoche and Steve Carrell at the premiere of Dan In Real Life in October; photo by Eric Charbonneau/Wire Image)