If you watch as many movies and TV shows as I do you’ll notice something rather annoying besides all the lame cliches that keep getting trotted out. And that’s the latest cliche to show up over and over again as the big “reveal” of the climax.

The bad guy turns out to be a traitor of some kind.

Either he’s the hero’s close relative, friend, buddy, co-worker…or, if the film deals with the military or national security in some way, the villain turns out to be a “patriot” who is trying to save America from itself by destroying it.

You have to ask yourself, what kind of Freudian slip is this? Writers usually know what they are trying to say. I know that may be hard to believe if you saw Terminator: Salvation or Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, but yes, writers usually are trying to make some kind of thematic statement.

The idea of a traitor can be powerful in dramatic terms. Someone you trust and rely on turns out to be your real enemy. That can be a very painful thing to discover, but it’s become such a common device in film it is almost a given. Which means what? Hollywood is lazy, or they feel we can’t trust anyone anymore?

Well hey, they invested a lot of faith and trust in our current president and look how that worked out. Except this has been going on for at least a decade now.

Let’s take two recent examples of the traitor. The first one is a big spoiler so don’t read the rest of the next paragraph after SPOILER: if you don’t want the movie “ruined” for you.

Smoking Aces 2: Assassins Ball features Tom Berenger as a handicapped lifer CIA desk jockey who is targeted by a whole slew of crazed assassins to want to kill him for some reason, at a certain time and place. The FBI wants to protect him when this hit is going down so they can discover why these killers are after Berenger. He seems to be a loyal worker for the US, a patriot (look out!) who has served his country for 30 years. SPOILER: And of course, he set up his own execution to lure a bunch of rogue assassins into a trap where they’d be killed, because he wanted to cover up the fact he used them to do terrorist acts around the world for the US government. Yes, the US government. Including the Spanish train bombing a few years back. And he doesn’t care if all these FBI agents protecting him get killed in the process. See, anyone called in a patriot in movies these days is a psycho. And, as we saw in last season’s 24 or Die Hard: Live Free or Die, patriots have no problem killing off Americans in the name of saving “America from itself”.

In Avatar we have the progressive’s favorite kind of traitor. The kind who sells out his own people. Avatar’s “hero” is a Marine who decides alien poontang trumps your entire species. He condemns his planet to slow destruction rather than allow them to continue to over-zealously mine some ore. His own troops, who he was supposed to represent, get slaughtered and the rest of his people get shipped off and humiliated so he can get rid of his puny white body and become a big blue stud. Sounds like the worst case of white guilt/penis envy ever imagined.

Talk about Freudian, Mr. Cameron.

Of course, the argument the story makes is sophomoric at best, it’s a Edgar Rice Burrough’s pastiche with some Hayao Miyazaki and Roger Dean thrown in. At no point do the “bad guys” have any sense to try negotiation with the dominate species. It’s a puerile parable of western civilization raping the new world. But what a lot of people seem to miss is the fact that the hero sells out his entire planet which needs this rock to live. And there is no attempt to work out a solution. As bad as the earth people are in the film, condemning your whole species because you like going native is a sad commentary on where some people’s heads at. And it reveals a dark undercurrent in the psychology of left leaning film makers.

Hollywood needs to take a break from his hack plot device. It has already lost its mojo. Let it rest for a few decades so it can regain its punch. And Hollywood, don’t think the success of Avatar had anything to do with its lame political message. All that money you wasted on Iraq bombs should have taught you that lesson by now.

Not this time. And that is why, despite spectacular visual effects, a brooding and hyper-popular Christian Bale in the lead role, and marketing that pretty much stamped the title across my kids’ foreheads, Terminator Salvation is not nearly the success that the other three movies were.

John Connor and his mom (and his friends and pretty much everybody else with whom they ever come in contact) become instant targets for future-born Terminator robots. The setup is pretty straightforward. The time is present day.

I’m talking about the other pictures, not this one.

This picture is the dog that caught the car: finally we are carried into the future where the post-nuclear dystopian world is filled with killer robots on a constant hunt. This is what we have been (well, I have been) curious to see since the very first of these pictures. Turns out, though, that a bunch of anonymous killer robots aren’t much more interesting than a bunch of trees in the wind or a bunch of cars in traffic. You gotta have a personal story to make the movie take off—you gotta have a conflict so clear it bats you in the head, for instance, the marketing campaign for a big summer movie about killer robots from the future.

In this picture, John Connor is… umm… I think he’s trying to save a guy long enough for that guy to go back in history to impregnate Connor’s mother-to-be so she can give birth to him (Connor) so he (Connor again) can grow up to—save the life of his father so he can go back in time to impregnate Connor’s mother to give birth to him? Maybe? Wasn’t this supposed to be about a killer robot? Ah, well. I wish it was just John Connor and his mother-du-jour on the run from a Terminator, in a series of hair’s-breadth escapes that make mayhem and carnage of and around the lower-billed actors, each of who should enjoy a nifty/gross death scene that they can put on their reel.

This picture needed a bad guy, or a bad robot (which might make it a job for J.J. Abrams, haha) to chase the good guy around—and this good guy didn’t come off as particularly likable, by the way, or even particularly good.

Oh—and the final cheat is that after spending two hours hearing that this is the decisive battle against the evil Skynet, we learn in an end-of-movie voiceover that—surprise!—this is actually just one more battle in the apparently eternal march against Skynet. Can they never be defeated? Only by relatively bad box office, I guess. Maybe this time.

Steve Mason’s Exclusive Early Box Office Estimates:

1. Up – $20.5M Friday … $67M 3-day … $67M cume
2. Night at the Museum 2 – $7.5M Friday … $27M 3-day … $106.79M cume
3. Drag Me To Hell – $6.25M Friday … $16.5M 3-day … $16.5M cume
4. Terminator Salvation- $5M Friday … $16M 3-day … $90.5M cume
5. Star Trek – $3.7M Friday … $13.5M 3-day … $210.2M cume
6. Angels & Demons – $3.6M Friday … $12M 3-day … $105.56M cume
7. Dance Flick – $1.7M Friday … $5.2M 3-day … $19.54M cume

If these numbers hold, “Up” will open better than “Wall-E” and “Monsters and Aliens.”

Considering ”Up” is fairly low concept and starring a 78 year-old man, this is beyond impressive. Word of mouth, rave reviews and the reservoir of goodwill Pixar’s built up over the years are making this a real audience-driven sensation.

As of Thursday “Terminator Salvation” is tracking almost to the dollar with “Terminator 3.” Figuring for inflation, this is a major disappointment, especially when Schwarzenegger’s last outing was considered an under-performer.

“Angels and Demons” is also tracking poorly, well behind its predecessor: $33M compared to $52M.

“Wolverine” is a hit and “Star Trek” is a smash.

Terminator Salvation, the fourth film in the apocalyptic action series, is heavy on action and sensational visual effects, but weak on the things that originally made this series so popular. It will please audience members who don’t expect too much from it.

Terminator Salvation is the first in the series without Arnold Schwarzenegger as a primary character, and the series has moved increasingly away from the personal, intimate approach of the first installment (in which the fate of Sarah Connor was at the center of the story and her relationship with Kyle Reese is at the forefront).

True drama is created when characters with whom we can identify are forced to make difficult moral choices. That requires the creation of strong characters and the crafting of situations where they are forced to decide between conflicting goods and harms–not just strategic questions (how best to defeat the enemy) but instead situations involving difficult trade-offs (such as whether to put an innocent person in mortal danger in order to save others).

Unfortunately, Terminator Salvation tends to fall short both in creating characters and in crafting interesting new dilemmas for them, instead relying too much on contemporary action movie conventions and clichés. The hollowness of most of the characters and the lack of real, personal dilemmas undermine the drama of the film, leaving only the flash and bang, which are admittedly diverting but leave one wanting more soul.

The use of apocalyptic imagery and Christian themes certainly has helped sustain interest in the series, and Terminator Salvation retains those elements and builds on them (particularly the theme of self-sacrifice, which has always been strong in the series).

However, the move away from the human-scale of The Terminator to the now all-too-typical world-scale action makes the film much less interesting. These elements are reminiscent of Transformers and Steven Spielberg’s uninspired remake of War of the Worlds and suggest a serious lack of imagination and inspiration.

As with Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, James Cameron, co-writer and director of The Terminator, was not involved in making Terminator Salvation, and his ability to place strong human relationships at the center of momentous events (Titanic, Aliens, The Abyss) is sorely missed here, as is that of his co-writer and producer of The Terminator, Gale Ann Hurd. (Hurd’s involvement in the Fox TV series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is evident in the show’s stronger presentation of character relationships.)

The people behind Terminator Salvation certainly appear to have tried to create some relationships among the characters and thereby force them to make some dramatic choices, but the characters are continually overwhelmed by the big events swirling around them. Hence it’s difficult really to care for them, as they tend to remain somewhat generic stand-ins for real human beings.

In this regard Christian Bale and Bryce Dallas Howard in particular fall short, whereas Sam Worthington does a superb job of making Marcus Wright real, human, and appealing–rather ironically, given a plot element that I won’t reveal here.

Despite all of these elements working against it, Terminator Salvation earned significantly more money (in nominal dollars unadjusted for inflation) in its first weekend than The Terminator did in its entire theatrical run, and it’s likely to do well overall. Nonetheless, although the producers have left room for a sequel, it’s difficult to envision further installments having much attraction for audiences unless the series begins again to accommodate real human beings with real human concerns.

For that to happen, it would perhaps be a good idea to return to the low-budget, human-centered approach of The Terminator, though that’s exceedingly unlikely at this point.

–S. T. Karnick, editor of The American Culture website

Those rows of white tombstones decorated with little flags are the reason Americans don’t walk downtown, past the ruins where the synagogue once stood, to grab a schnitzel und ein bier from that little imbiss next to der bahnhof.  They are why there isn’t a smoking pit in the heart of Los Angeles where the Library Tower used to be.

Violence never solves anything, war is not the answer, arms are for hugging….  It’s hard to believe that there are adults out there that actually buy into such foolishness.

Memorial Day is about men and women who didn’t orient their lives to the dictates of poorly thought-through bumper sticker clichés that belong on the rear of some NPR-listening public school administrator’s Prius.  It’s about men and women who understood that sometimes doing the right thing means doing the hardest thing.

Violence can solve things.  Hitler – solved.  Tojo – solved.  Saddam – solved.  Sometimes it takes time:  Bin Laden – solution pending.  But all the earnest teach-ins and doofy drum circles in the world haven’t kept one Darfurian from being killed by the janjaweed Islamist militia.  The only thing that will ever do that is a division of Marines; until the activists call for the Devil Dogs to go in, they’re just posing.

Frequently, war is the answer.  With the sorry state of history education in America, it’s easy to see how some people could embrace the delusion that there is nothing worth fighting for.  But the Nazi concentration camps didn’t liberate themselves.  Bosnia and Kosovo’s ethnic cleansing didn’t end because Milosevic got a pretty please with sugar on top.  And the Taliban aren’t about to see the light and stop throwing acid in schoolgirl’s faces for the crime of wanting to learn to read. 

War and violence aren’t the only answers – I worked in civil affairs on one deployment and we made a huge difference without firing a shot.  Sometimes American soldiers’ arms are for hugging – I’ve seen that too – but before you can build a peace you have to enforce security.  That means a grunt standing watch, M4 in hand, with a pilot in an F-15 overhead and a destroyer off-shore.

What is ironic is that Hollywood, for all its superficial peacenik posing, gets it.  The messages of two of the biggest movies out right now, Star Trek and Terminator Salvation, are that there are things worth fighting for and dying for.  Sadly, Hollywood feels the need to cloak that truth in the guise of battles against pointy-eared space aliens and death-dealing cyborgs that look like our governor. 

Hollywood, just lose the metaphors.  It would be nice to see a straight-up movie about the sacrifices of American soldiers in the War on Terror that doesn’t replace jihadi psychos with Romulans or SkyNet. 

Memorial Day is the perfect occasion to embrace the truth.  Do not listen to those who say that it is just another day off where people do nothing but drink beer and eat barbecue with their buddies.  That’s a strawman offered up by the bumper sticker set because they fear Memorial Day’s true meaning.   

At the risk of being presumptuous, those who gave their lives for our country would want you to gather your buddies and drink beers and eat barbecue (Resolved:  Barbecued beef ribs are superior in every way to pork ribs.  Discuss.).   I plan to.  There is a reason that on Memorial Day the flag flies at half-staff only until noon, when it is raised to the top of the pole again.  It symbolizes that we honor our dead by going forward with our lives.

Honor our fallen by remembering them, and just as importantly, what they did.  We can do that best by confronting the nonsense that surrounds us by telling the stories of these brave American men and women.  When little Jimmy comes home confused because the teacher said that America is irremediably racist, you tell him about the Union soldiers who fell at Gettysburg.  When your daughter tells you her textbook says that World War II was really instigated by war profiteers, pop in the disc of the Band of Brothers episode where Easy Company stumbles onto a Nazi death camp.  When your son asks what that bumper sticker saying “End the War” means, you tell him about what the cops and firefighters had to do on 9/11.  Let the truth be your tribute.

Have at it.

Discuss. Debate. Write your own review…

Big Hollywood’s review can be found here.

What a crushing and noisy disappointment this is. For whatever reason, Director McG’s fourth chapter in the “Terminator” franchise tosses aside the simple but successful plot template that made its predecessors so memorable and goes all “Bourne” with a hyper-complicated plot, narcissistic “hero” and a big fat wide blur between the concept of good battling evil. Yes, welcome to Hollywood’s post-Bush “Terminator,” where a militaristic Resistance demands we “Stay the course,” Terminators work through their feelings, and John Connor runs off to find himself only to end up in a numbingly dull third act that plays like a direct-to-DVD toss off.

Things open on an intriguing and hopeful note. The year is 2003 and Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) is a guilt-ridden death row inmate not far from execution. Dr. Serena Krogen (Helena Bonham Carter, who’s always interesting), approaches Wright for what we assume is the umpteenth time to convince him to donate his body to science. His coming to terms with his own death mixed with her losing battle with cancer sparks his humanity and he relents. The State gives him what he deserves and we cut to 2018.

The world as we knew it is now ravaged by a war the machines wage against mankind. Cities are reduced to rubble and those who survive are reduced to prey, living underground or constantly on the run. Some have organized into what’s called the Resistance and their spiritual leader is John Connor (Christian Bale).

Connor has married Kate (Bryce Dallas Howard in a role originated by Claire Danes in the third installment) and carries the burden of both his command and the myth built around him by others and in his own mind thanks to his mother, Sarah Conner. His mission is simple: to create his own fate which starts with making sure he’s born in the first place. This means he has to find the teenage Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin in a role originated by Michael Biehn) and send him back in time to impregnate his mother.

***PLOT SPOILERS COMING***

The Resistance is bigger than Connor, though, and General Ashdale (the awe. some. Michael Ironside) has come across an electronic device that, if launched with strategic world-wide coordination, will bring the machines down once and forever. This practical solution conflicts with Connor’s belief in a bigger fate, especially regarding Kyle Reese. The arrival of Wright, an escapee from Skynet whose last memory is of being on death row 15 years earlier, only complicates things further.

Overall, the first forty-minutes pretty much mange to live up to expectations. There are two truly spectacular action scenes, both good enough to hang with the best of the franchise. But these two set pieces do not build up enough goodwill to get you through the rest of the picture which gets progressively choppy, tedious and disconnected.

There’s a major turning point where Connor decides to split with the Resistance in order to break into Skynet and save Reese. This is where the narrative collapses entirely. The last hour or so plays like a film edited over and over and over in the hopes of creating something from a ton of footage containing plenty of action but no compelling story to hold it together. The final result is a scattered, confusing, completely un-engaging climax disconnected from anything other than its own stunts and special effects.

You will also marvel at just how easy it is for one man to break into Skynet. What could have been an imaginative and exciting sequence with our hero making his way into what should be the most secure facility ever conceived, ends up being a major letdown like something out of a “Remington Steele” episode. What follows is somehow worse.

Another narrative mistake is that we’re never told whose movie we’re watching. Is this the story of John Connor or Marcus Wright? There are large portions of time where Connor is either completely out of the picture or relegated to a supporting role. The focus keeps switching back and forth until it reaches the critical point of being no one’s movie.

Another downer is the relentlessly oppressive cinematography. At first it works, but as the narrative implodes the washed out, barrenness of it all begins to feel self-conscious. The same can be said for Danny Elfman’s score and the furious sound design, which constantly intrude as they try to make up for the lack of human drama.

Bale’s performance is surprisingly one-note, and that one note is dour. Worthington comes off best as the tortured survivor trying to unravel his past, but Bryce Dallas Howard is completely wasted in a nothing role. My guess is that the script offered her a couple juicy scenes that ended up being cut. Her role is so pointless the fact that she’s well along in a pregnancy isn’t even discussed — which is terrible storytelling — like showing the audience a gun’s hidden in a drawer but never coming back to it.

I’m a huge fans of all the “Terminator” films, the third being one of the most pleasant surprises of 2003, and there’s no reason the mythology and world created by James Cameron had to run out of gas. But here it does, and the reason is simple: McG isn’t a director, he’s a story-boarder, and the film’s antagonist is not an all kinds of cool, relentlessly bad ass Terminator or even Skynet. The antagonist is the angst and inner-conflict experienced by Connor and Wright – and who wants to see that?

If you got an incurable thing for killer robots (and don’t we all), wait for DVD or “Transformers 2.”

“Terminator Salvation” opens everywhere at midnight tonight.

–

I say, after three previous movies, if anyone’s going to this film to be surprised, they’re probably going to be disappointed. If a film creates a compelling world, knowing the plot does not matter. Call it “The Godfather Effect.”  I’ve seen those films (“Godfather I” or “II,” take your pick) dozens of times, yet I’ll always stop and watch them while couchsurfing.

Why? Great characters and a fascinatingly rich world centered on power and family.

While I’m not saying “Salvation” is “The Godfather,” I do like the world of these films. I’m seeing “Salvation” tonight with BH honcho John Nolte and I can’t wait.

Oh, and speaking of revealing too much, “Salvation” director McG tells SciFi Wire a promised nudie scene where Moon Bloodgood takes her shirt off felt gratuitous. 

Here’s Moon:

And here’s what McG told SciFi Wire:

There’s a topless scene of Moon Bloodgood that I thought was a very beautiful scene, that Moon thought was a beautiful scene, that we ultimately cut because we didn’t want to fall into any of the cliches of the genre, like “Here’s the scene where the beautiful girl takes her top off.” I thought it was a soft moment between a man and a woman that was designed to echo the Kelly McGillis/Harrison Ford moment in Witness, for God’s sake. They never touch each other; they just notice each other. But, in the end, it felt more like a gratuitous moment of a girl taking her top off in an action picture, and I didn’t want that to convolute the story or the characters.

For the cynics out there who say the studio probably pressured him into it for a PG-13 rating, McG says it ain’t so, honest Injun’: 

We were liberated by [Warner Brothers president of production] Jeff Robinov from day one, and I give you my word that there’s no way that Christian or Sam or I, for that matter, would shoot a picture aiming for a rating.

Star-turned-producer Hugh Jackman has scored his second-biggest opening ever and, easily, his biggest as a solo star. Wolverine has mauled the competition with a massive $34.75M opening day (including $5M or so in Thursday midnight sales). That could translate to a 3-day of $86.8M, getting Hollywood’s most lucrative season off to a spectacular start.

The stars of WOLVERINE (from the left): Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool, Taylor Kitsch as Gambit, Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, Liev Schrieber as Sabretooth and Lynn Collins as Kayla Silverfox

The X-Men spin-off, which has been made for substantially less than the $210M budget ponied up for to produce 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand, becomes the all-time fourth-best first-weekend-of-May opening, trailing only Spider-Man 3 ($151.1M), the original 2002 Spider-Man ($114.8M) and last May’s Iron Man ($98.6M). Wolverine has also posted one of the top seven opening days ever for a comic book adaptation.

ALL-TIME BEST OPENINGS DAYS FOR COMIC BOOK ADAPTATIONS
1. The Dark Knight – $67.1M
2. Spider-Man 3 – $59.8M
3. X-Men: The Last Stand – $45.1M
4. Spider-Man 2 – $40.4M
5. Spider-Man – $39.4M
6. Iron Man – $35.2M
7. X-Men Origins: Wolverine – $34.75M (estimated)
8. X2: X-Men United – $31.2M
9. 300 – $28.1M
10. Watchmen – $24.5M

And, as comic book movies go, Jackman’s solo effort has cut and sliced through the pack to become the all-time seventh-best 3-day start.

X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE will not match the opening weekend of last year's summer starter IRON MAN

ALL-TIME BEST OPENING WEEKENDS FOR A COMIC BOOK ADAPTATION
1. The Dark Knight – $158.4M
2. Spider-Man 3 – $151.1M
3. Spider-Man – $114.8M
4. X-Men: The Last Stand – $102.7M
5. Iron Man – $98.6M
6. Spider-Man 2 – $88.1M
7. X-Men Origins: Wolverine – $86.8M (projected)
8. X2: X-Men United – $85.5M
9. 300 – $70.8M
10. Hulk – $62.1M

How does Jackman hold his silverware during dinner?

Jackman himself is getting lots of positive feedback on his personal Twitter page, but there is some real negative feedback in the Twitterverse. Here are some actually Tweets from movie fans that have been posted in the last couple of hours.

if its wolverine dont waste your time

Wolverine sucks!

Wolverine: not too bad. Better than the horrible second X-Men movie. Coolest thing was preview for District-9.

I went and paid for 2 movie tix to see that damn Wolverine movie. I just wasted my money.

Wolverine was ok – too much smooshed into one movie and too many things attempted to be neatly wrapped up and squared away.

Saw Wolverine. It was weak.

What does Hugh Jackman being a hottie have 2 do w/ how crappy the movie is?

Oh my God Wolverine was just as bad as everyone was saying.

out to see Wolverine! Ill let you guys know how bad it is.

“don’t waste your money” unless you’re a huge fan. Like 2nd X-files bad.

So, it appears that fans are as tepid about this movie as film critics. X-Men Origins: Wolverine will likely be very front-loaded both for the weekend and the long haul. I’m guessing that the weekend could play out like this. Wolverine did $5M Thursday at midnight and has added another $29.75M Friday (for a $34.75M opening day). Then Saturday, the movie may drop 9% to $31.6M or so, followed by a Sunday dip of 36% to just over $20M.

Jackman is not just another action star; Here he is in his Tony-winning performance in Broadway's BOY FROM OZ

After speaking with a number of competing studios, the consensus is that Wolverine will have a multiple of less than two. (The multiple is the number by which you multiply the opening weekend to arrive at the ultimate domestic gross.) With a multiple in the 1.8-1.9 range, the summer’s first movie spectacle will finish at $156-$165M. That’s a good, but not great number. Meanwhile, Star Trek (Paramount) has a chance to be this year’s Iron Man, an early May release that plays deep into the summer at a high multiple in the 3.2-3.3 range.

Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Garner are creating some sparks in GHOSTS OF GIRLFRIENDS PAST

The other wide release in the marketplace this weekend is the poorly-reviewed Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (Warner Bros). With Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Garner as the romantic leads and an assist from Oscar winner Michael Douglas, Ghosts has performed decently, especially with Females 25 Plus. The Mark Waters-directed rom-com coaxed an estimated $6M in opening day sales and will likely reach about $16.5M for the weekend. That’s would be 12% stronger than last year’s first-weekend-of-May chick-flick counter programming, Made of Honor, which finished second to Iron Man with $14.7M.

Ali Larter (center) and Beyonce (right) come to blows over THE WIRE's Idris Elba in OBSESSED

Last weekend’s box office champ Obsessed (Sony) – the one where Beyonce “tromps a tramp” (played by Ali Larter from Heroes) – took a nosedive with just $4.2M or so on Friday. It seems headed for an estimated 3-day of $12.39M, down 57% from its opening, but the genre pic with a budget of only $20M will still have $47M in the bank by Monday. That’s a very profitable little movie.

Tween are pushing Zac Efron's 17 AGAIN past the $50M mark

The Warner Bros comedy 17 Again, starring tween dream Zac Efron, continues to perform well with about $2.22M to start the weekend and a possible $6.62M for the frame. Zac’s high-concept comedy will have topped $48.7M domestic in its first 17 days of release.

The new nature doc EARTH is really just the Cliff Notes for the extraordinary BBC miniseries PLANET EARTH

Disney’s Earth, a 90-minute version of the BBC’s 11-hour 2006 miniseries Planet Earth, will round out the top five for the first official weekend of summer. The nature doc grabbed $1.45M on its second Friday and is targeting $5.81M and a new 12-day cume of $23.47M by Monday.

The other wide release is the 3-D pic Battle For Terra (Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions). It is on just over 1,100 screens, but has managed only about $300,000 on opening day. I did see a commercial for Terra during American Idol this week, so there was some money spent, but it couldn’t have been much. Despite respectable reviews, this cg animated flick is destined for no more than $1M. That’s a full-on disaster.

EXCLUSIVE STEVE MASON EARLY FRIDAY ESTIMATES
1. NEW – X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Fox) – $34.75M, $8,478 PTA, $34.75M cume
2. NEW – Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (Warner Bros) – $6M, $1,890 PTA, $6M
3. Obsessed (Sony) – $4.2M, $1,671 PTA, $39M cume
4. 17 Again (Warner Bros) – $2.22M, $682 PTA, $44.36M cume
5. The Soloist (Dreamworks/Paramount) – $1.7M, $836 PTA, $14.2M cume
6. Earth (Disney) – $1.45M, $804 PTA, $19.11M cume
7. Monsters vs. Aliens (Dreamworks/Paramount) – $1.41M, $537 PTA, $178M cume
8. Fighting (Rogue) – $1.4M, $608 PTA, $14.73M cume
9. State of Play (Universal) – $1.28M, $527 PTA, $28.51M cume
10. Hannah Montana: The Movie (Disney) – $1.1M, $390 PTA, $67.88M cume
*NEW – Battle For Terra (Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions) – $300,000, $258 PTA, $300,000 cume

EXCLUSIVE STEVE MASON EARLY 3-DAY ESTIMATES
1. NEW – X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Fox) – $86.8M, $21,194 PTA, $86.8M cume
2. NEW – Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (Warner Bros) – $16.5M, $5,197 PTA, $16.5M
3. Obsessed (Sony) – $12.39M, $4,928 PTA, $47.19M cume
4. 17 Again (Warner Bros) – $6.62M, $2,034 PTA, $48.76M cume
5. Earth (Disney) – $5.81M, $3,221 PTA, $23.47M cume
6. The Soloist (Dreamworks/Paramount) – $5.7M, $2,804 PTA, $18.2M cume
7. Monsters vs. Aliens (Dreamworks/Paramount) – $5.65M, $2,152 PTA, $182.25M cume
8. State of Play (Universal) – $4.31M, $1,765 PTA, $31.54M cume
9. Hannah Montana: The Movie (Disney) – $3.96M, $1,405 PTA, $70.74M cume
10. Fighting (Rogue) – $3.76M, $1,630 PTA, $17.1M cume
*NEW – Battle For Terra (Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions) – $1M, $878 PTA, $1M cume

Steve Mason is on Facebook and now also on Twitter@LAMase.