Code green

So what are we to make of “The Da Vinci Code” box office: $77.2 million in U.S. ticket sales and a record-busting $147 million internationally? Simply this: Lukewarm reviews can’t defuse a wanna-see factor that’s been building for months and is now officially huge. I knew this was going to have a phenomenal opening back in December, when people who never seemed to care about movies started asking me “Have you seen ‘Da Vinci Code’ yet?” The combined global take of $224 million is the second-best worldwide opening ever, behind “Star Wars Episode III.”

And yet: It’s worth noting that ticket sales declined 6% from Friday to Saturday – I bet that *is* a result of spreading tepid response to the movie itself. I'll hazard that, in the end, the movie won’t be a phenomenon the way the book was and that coming weeks will see “Code” tail off fairly drastically, at stateside moviehouses at least. An uninspired photocopy, after all, is an uninspired photocopy. But the folks at Sony are ecstatic: they’d estimated the movie coming in at $190 mill.

They’re happy at Dreamworks, too, since “Over the Hedge” pulled in a strong $37 million on a weekend in which everyone assumed “Da Vinci Code” would turn it to roadkill. Is it because word was out that “Hedge” is a cut above recent family CGI fare like “Ice Age 2” and “The Wild”? Or were these just audiences that couldn’t get into sold-out screenings of Ron Howard’s blockbuster? More box-office parsing here.

What’s doing at Cannes? This year’s festival has finally disgorged a controversial stink-bomb (maybe) of the sort critics love to dogfight over. It’s “Southland Tales,” an acrid dystopian fantasy from “Donnie Darko” writer-director Richard Kelly, and it has everyone on the Croisette in a snit. Read a digest of the slings and arrows here, at the exceptionally useful Greencine Daily. Sounds to me like what “V for Vendetta” might have been if it had taken real chances; at any rate, I’m now officially pumped to see it.