Art House Heat Wave

As a pair of specialty breakouts ride respective waves of momentum into the commercial mainstream, the upcoming weekend of July 31 will see notable glut of art house competition fight for the attention of trendsetting ticket-buyers.

The specialty box office has been threatening to spark fire all summer, with audience traffic for Fox Searchlight's second-weekend wonder "(500) Days of Summer" and Summit's month-old slow burner "The Hurt Locker" generating the most heat of late.
"Summer" meant business right out of the gate. The hipster romance averaged more than $30,000 from each of its 27 opening weekend screens, ramping up its sophomore venue count to 85 and scoring a sizzling screen average just shy of $20,000 before a planned expansion to 300 locations this Friday. With a cool $3 million total after just 10 days, the Zooey Deschanel/Joseph-Gordon Levitt duet should sing sweetly right on through August and into the Indian Summer sunset.

Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker," a decidedly macho alternative to the twee Searchlight sensation, is a riskier bet for distributor Summit. The upstart studio has mounted an impressively measured rollout to build word-of-mouth momentum, opening the gruelingly intense war-zone thriller on four screens over the weekend of June 26 and slowly turning up the heat as it expanded to cities nationwide throughout July. Over the weekend, "Locker" lit up 238 theaters and locked down a solid $6,000+ per screen, down just 15% from its average on 94 screens last weekend. Summit isn't slowing down now, unleashing "Hurt Locker" in more than 500 theaters over the July 31 frame, taking cover and holding on tight with hopeful expansions ahead if Middle America proves patriotic, indeed.

Getting an early start on the weekend traffic jam, Fox Searchlight opens the modest mentally-handicapped romance "Adam" at 4 exclusive venues on Wednesday, hoping to replicate on a smaller scale the buzz-building rollout of studio sibling "(500) Days of Summer." Good luck. The eponymous Hugh Dancy character is a man with Asburger's Syndrome, which afflicts sufferers variously but is usually defined by a collective lack of social tact, self-awareness, and brain-to-mouth filtration functions. Rose Byrne plays Adam's reluctant love interest, who sees beyond his condition to the probable soul mate within. Kleenex likely required.

Also sinking its fangs into a quartet of big city theaters, Focus Features' South Korean import "Thirst" arrives stateside after a boffo turnout at home, where public bloodlust hit a fever pitch for "Oldboy" auteur Park Chan-wook's spin on the red-hot vampire genre. The film scored the biggest opening of 2009, and hit the ground running at its Cannes premiere less than a month later. Universal's specialty division seems to have high commercial hopes for "Thirst," which joins the ubiquitous "Twilight" franchise and art house hit "Let the Right One In" (along with HBO's "True Blood," which has grown in popularity in cohesion with the demands of the cultural zeitgeist) as the latest offering for vampire-hungry audiences to taste and relish.

Sony Classics picked up "Lorna's Silence," the latest from the Dardenne Brothers of continuous Cannes-darling status, after the fest closed in 2008, holding the film back from U.S. release for more than a year. Commercial prospects are iffy, even without obvious studio reluctance threatening to derail buzz, so look for little more than silence from "Lorna" when the film appears in a handful of cities this weekend.

Also premiering at Cannes back in '08, the Danish import "Flame + Citron" finally opens stateside thanks to IFC Films. A WWII espionage epic from director Ole Christian Madsen, "Flame + Citron" was big in the Netherlands (thanks in no small part to stars Mads Mikkelsen and Thure Lindhart in titular starring roles), drawing comparisons to Paul Verhoven's exhilirating "Black Book" with its definitively Euro approach to the dusty genre.

The most promising of this weekend's lot is perhaps the least appealing on paper. "The Cove," a documentary about the conspiracy surrounding the endangered dolphins of Japan, boasts a killer trailer that likens the film to both "Flipper" and "The Bourne Identity" (!!!) and puts its money where its mouth is immediately, tightening a vise of unbelievable suspense and leaving audiences breathless in anticipation. Roadside Attractions and Lionsgate are joining forces to release the Sundance pickup, and if the tide of excitement preceding "The Cove" is any indication, the combined effort is sure to pay off.