G-Force

G-Force beats Harry Potter 6 to top of North American box office

Warner’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince earned $30m in its second weekend, down a big 61.5% from opening weekend, putting it in second place behind Buena Vista’s animated guinea pigs in G-Force.

G-Force, a 3-D combination of animation and live action, opened with a larger-than-expected estimated $32.2m, an average of $8,697 from 3,697 screens.

G-Force, produced by blockbuster king Jerry Bruckheimer, features a voice cast including Nicolas Cage, Sam Rockwell, Tracy Morgan and Penelope Cruz. The plot is about government trained spies, who happen to be guinea pigs, trying to save the world from an evil CEO.

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RODENTS MAGICALLY BRING DOWN WIZARD

Who would have thought? Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince lasted just one week at the top of the box office, toppled by the animated rodents of Disney's G-Force. Perhaps even more voldemortifying, it did only slightly better than a relatively low-budget, critically derided romantic comedy, The Ugly Truth. G-Force, which combines animation and live-action, took in an estimated $32.2 million -- about $12 million more than analysts had predicted. The latest Potter sequel, by contrast, earned about $10 million less than what had had been expected -- $30 million, representing a 61-percent drop from last weekend. Most surprising of all perhaps was the performance of the Katherine Heigl starrer The Ugly Truth, which debuted with $27 million, well above analysts' forecasts, to place third. Sony Pictures' distribution chief Rory Bruer appeared steeped in schadenfreude when he told the Associated Press this ugly truth about the film's solid opening: "If I have a choice of deciding between what the audience's opinion is going to be versus the critics', I'll definitely go with the audience's every day, and they spoke loud and clear." A third new film, the horror flick Orphan, came in fourth with $12.8 million, somewhat less than forecast. Still going strong was the summer's biggest hit, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which added another $8 million to its gross to become, with a total of $379 million, the 10th-highest-grossing movie of all time.

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Screen Daily Review of 'G-Force'

Jerry Bruckheimer makes a play for the under-10s with G-Force – about the only demographic he hasn’t yet completely conquered – in another venture with Walt Disney, which knows this market best.

It’s a scaled-down-for-tots action adventure, framed somewhat gratuitously in 3D from a screenplay generated by the National Treasure team about a SWAT-like force of CG guinea pigs. And a mole. And a few cockroaches. A quick caveat: while kids may squeal in delight, gangs of realistically-rendered 3D cockroaches are not necessarily something parents want to pay to see.

It’s a shame that the heart of the story doesn’t beat strongly enough to match the visual invention onscreen.

After the fresh breeze that lifted Up and Ice Age 3, G-Force feels like a more calculated, cynical effort. An all-star voice cast – led by Nicolas Cage and Sam Rockwell – has been drafted in to portray the remarkably-lifelike pigs, while the film comes replete with the type of knowing humour which supposedly appeals to parents (“don’t drop a pellet” says one guinea pig, while the other marvels at the villain’s “$6,000-suit, $50,000 watch, and….size 36 Hanes tighty-whiteys.”).

G-Force wears its inspiration on its sleeve (Transformers, Babe, Toy Story, box office), but the marketing power of Bruckheimer/Disney can never be discounted and there’s certainly a gap in the market as Ice Age cools off which G-Force could partially fill. Whether it will do better business for pet shops than Disney remains to be seen; a film franchise seems unlikely, but a TV series could be ideal.

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