Universal Pays Up for Faking 'Fourth Kind' Stories

See, what happens when you make stuff up is that people tend to believe it if it looks authentic. That's a consequence Universal apparently didn't consider when making up bogus news stories to support the premise that The Fourth Kind was based on a true story. At every turn, we did our best to tell you that it was not, indeed, factual in any way, but it's a great big world.

Universal will fork over a modest $20,000 to the Alaska Press Club, plus $2,500 to a scholarship fund, a reaction to complaints about fake news stories the studio planted. According to the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, the studio "created a series of fabricated online news articles to publicize the movie about a purported plague of alien abductions in Nome a decade ago. The articles posted appeared to be from real Alaska publications."

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Box Office - 'Precious' Sets Limited Release Record

The biggest news at the box office this weekend was the smallest movie. Taking a page out of the book of Paranormal Activity, the Oscar-hyped Precious set a theatrical record, averaging a whopping $100,000 per theater in its 18 locations. That's twice as much as Paranormal managed in its most productive per-screen weekend. And with no other Best Picture candidate in theaters for a month, this is just the beginning of a very healthy run for Precious. Its $1.8 million debut is the most money ever for a movie in so few theaters.

The official winner this weekend is A Christmas Carol. It should have done at least 20% better. A $31 million weekend is decent, and as we mentioned yesterday, it should do well between now and the end of the year because there's not much left for families, and it's so well known around the world that Disney will still make some cash. Could it have been released later in the month? Yeah, maybe, but as one of our astute readers pointed out in Saturday's box office discussion, it probably wouldn't have had a better start any other weekend through the end of the year. In Disney's corporate world view, though, it will be a boost to the company's fourth quarter. Isn't that what it's all about?

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Box Office - 'Christmas Carol' Takes Friday

A Christmas Carol is the widest-ever 3-D release and it again reinforces that studios are looking to capitalize on the new technology. A $9 million Friday won't hurt, although that shouldn't push the film above or even near most box office estimates for the weekend, anywhere between $37 - $42 million. More than likely, this will be a low-$30s, which isn't bad, given the powerful months ahead for the film nationwide and around the world. But it's not exactly a ringing endorsement.

It was a first-place start, though, and it will win the weekend without a lot of trouble, but it's lower start than director Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf, which you could certainly argue is less mainstream. There were a couple positive surprises, too. The Fourth Kind jumped out to a $5 million Friday, good enough for second place in a competitive weekend. I wrote on Thursday that if any of the new releases might be bound for a better finish, it would be the alien abduction thriller. So I was right about that, but wrong about The Men Who Stare at Goats, which placed an unexpected third with about $4.7 million. This Is It dropped to fourth place.

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Fearless Forecast: No Humbug for 'A Christmas Carol'

Michael Jackson's This Is It performed worse than expected last weekend, although you wouldn't know it to read the trades, many of which used way too many adjectives to describe a movie that did about as well as the latest Final Destination flick in its first stanza. Only that one had direct competition.

So the question for this weekend is, can A Christmas Carol, which also looks like it could fall well below the projections, actually reverse the trend? I don't think we'll see the same kind of business, where a movie estimated to make around $50 million in five days does 60% of that and is congratulated. More than likely, there will be plenty of family business in standard format theaters and IMAX to push this one to around $40 million. With about 3,500 theaters in all, that sounds about right to me, within 10% or so. The week's other new releases should do reasonably well given their smaller number of theaters. The Fourth Kind, The Box, and The Men Who Stare at Goats are all in the mid-2,000s this weekend, and if I had to pick one with a decent chance of exploding for more money, it would be The Fourth Kind, possibly building off some Paranormal Activity genre heat. Conversely, The Box might do worse than I'm estimating, but probably not much better.

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New 'Fourth Kind' Poster with Milla Jovovich

It's the battle of thrillers on November 6th. Warner Bros. has The Box, which looks really bad to me, and Universal is marching out The Fourth Kind, which does not look bad to me at all, but admittedly, that could just be the marketing talking.

Of course, when you look at box office, particularly opening weekend performance, the marketing plays a big part in that. Even with Cameron Diaz - who, let me reassure you, is not a box office draw on her own - Richard Kelly's The Box just isn't moving the needle. However, The Fourth Kind has that trumped up "based on real case studies" nonsense working in its favor, and it genuinely looks a little creepy. Neither will win their opening weekend, though; that would be A Christmas Carol. But I'll be interested to see if I'm right about this. I have a hunch Fourth Kind might just steamroll The Box. Here's the second poster for the film, which wisely features Milla Jovovich. She may not be an A-lister, but she's got plenty of credibility with the target audience for this film. So that's a smart move. Of course, unless you know she's in the film, you probably won't immediately recognize her here, and she's not an listed above the title. But I do like the explanation of the title they use. Busies it up a bit, but it's better than nothing at all. Thanks to IMP Awards for the poster:

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