This Just In: People Don't Like Katherine Heigl

If you follow this stuff even sporadically, you probably already know that a lot of people think Katherine Heigl is a bitch. It's not just one thing that the Emmy winner's detractors will point to, either. But she caused some internal strife for her Grey's Anatomy cast and crew when she appeared last month on Letterman, and now the fallout has gone straight to the top of the network.

Heigl made headlines a couple summers ago calling Knocked Up misogynistic. By the way, she was in that movie. Helped pave the way for the rest of her romantic comedies. And according to both Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow, she never so much as called them to apologize or at least offer an excuse. OK then. Around this time last year, she commented that her own writers on Grey's Anatomy didn't deserve their Emmy nominations because the show wasn't up to its usual standards that year. Classy. Then during publicity for The Ugly Truth, Heigl lamented actually having to work on her hit ABC show, telling Letterman, "Our first day back was Wednesday and it was — I’m going to keep saying this because I hope it embarrasses them — a 17-hour day, which I think is cruel and mean."

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Box Office - 'Funny People' Opens Slowly

Friday marked a less than auspicious start for Funny People, the latest Judd Apatow movie, which stars Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen. Those three names and their track records should have been enough to push Funny People over $10 million on opening day, but the film fell short of that, totaling only $8.6 million.

That's still enough to win Friday and possibly win the weekend, but for a movie with $30 million aspirations in its opening frame, $8 million won't get it there. It's worth noting that even with Apatow's two previous films and Sandler's loyal audience, Funny People opened with less cash than The Hangover and last weekend's The Ugly Truth.

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Box Office: 'Potter' Loses to 'G-Force'

It's time to admit I was wrong about the box office potential of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Not completely, utterly wrong, but when a movie starts out with the biggest midnight opening ever and trails off rather quickly from there, it's tough to keep up with projections. And that's the case here: It's still over $200 million, it still made almost $30 million in its second week, but it should be a little higher.

Potter didn't complete back-to-back turns at number one, and the last big, big blockbuster of the summer will now face a more difficult time going for the all-time record in the series, currently $319 million. Instead, Half-Blood Prince slipped to second place behind the new release G-Force and a little bit ahead of The Ugly Truth. Overall, Harry Potter stands at $222 million, which isn't bad for 12 days, but much like Transformers, an overwhelming amount of that cash came in the first couple of days. The family friendly G-Force picked up the win this weekend, due as much as anything to Potter's 61% drop from last weekend, which is like falling down an elevator shaft for a movie with outstanding reviews. G-Force earned $32 million in three days, which is a few million more than expectations, but probably not enough to put this in Ice Age territory, or north of $120 million.

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Box Office - 'G-Force' Forceful, 'Potter' Slumps

There's good news and bad news for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. The good news is that the film crossed the $200 million mark in the U.S. on Friday, the fastest any film in the series has reached two bills. The bad news is that it might not win this weekend's box office derby.

The 3-D live action-CGI G-Force roared out of the gate with $11.6 million on Friday, followed not by Potter but rather The Ugly Truth with $10.8 million. Half-Blood Prince sits about two million dollars off the pace. Those positions could shift over the weekend, and with Potter in about many more theaters (and because it's a very good film by Potter standards), I'd say there's a chance that will happen, but not great odds. We know it's going to do consistent business this weekend, although the Friday finish in the $9 - $10 million range may be a bad omen for the rest of the film's time in theaters. If Potter only manages around $30 million this weekend, that's a steep drop, and there's no reason to believe the film will bounce back in the future, meaning that golden $300 million barrier only one film in the series has crossed could be out of reach again.

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Movie Review - 'The Ugly Truth'

The Ugly Truth Starring Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler Directed by Robert Luketic Rated R

Why would a movie that's so mediocre, and had very little chance to be much more than that from the word go, resort to calling itself The Ugly Truth? Does it get any easier to make puns than that? Why not just call it You've Seen All This Before, But Done Much Better and be done with it? There's nothing here but what you expect. The characters are derivative, the actors are bored, and the only surprise about the script is that the writers were proud enough of their work to register it with the Writers Guild. The dice being rolled here are essentially that audiences will flock to see Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler in a romantic comedy. Butler is not in his element here, and in my opinion, he seems uncomfortable in this film, playing a chauvinist who tries to teach hopelessly single Heigl the real story behind relationships and why men and women are the way they are, particularly during courtship. It is not the most believable plot device to have Katherine Heigl unable to find a man, and this movie would probably work a lot better with less physically attractive lead actors, or at least one of them. The only reason the movie can get away with it to the slim degree it does is because both characters work in television, which is at least as bad about its looksism as the film industry. In a battle of the sexes, Heigl and Butler would work well together; she's independent and sexy and he's ruggedly handsome and all that. But a battle of the sexes, by definition, can't work when one or both of them are operating at a disadvantage. That's why Heigl's string of bad luck with men doesn't help the characters. If they were both overachievers, the way the personas of the actors are conveyed publicly, this could have been a fairly entertaining movie.

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