Yesterday’s comparison of the opening weekends for Stardust and Ladyhawke prompted some readers to remind me that director Matthew Vaughn actually had another twenty-year-old fantasy in mind when he was adapting Neil Gaiman‘s novel to the big screen: “I’m going to make a movie that has the fun and pacing of Midnight Run with the veneer of Princess Bride,” Vaughn said of his pre-production mindset when interviewed by the NY Times. So how does Stardust compare to Princess Bride? You’ll recall that Stardust made $9 million on 2,540 screens, or $3,548 a screen, last weekend. But when Princess Bride opened wide in October 1987, after two weeks in limited release, it made $4.48 million at just 622 screens, or $7,202 a screen, outperforming all its competition in the process. Again, remember that ticket prices were significantly lower in 1987, so Princess Bride was drawing huge crowds for that Columbus Day weekend—and since it had only cost about $16 million to make, the producers quickly recovered more than one-quarter of their budget. (Over the next ten weeks, the film would go on to gross $30.9 million.) And those were 1987 dollars; adjust for inflation, and the opening weekend comes in at just under $8 million… with roughly one-quarter the number of screenings of Stardust. Then factor in the fact that it only experienced a 19% dropoff the following weekend; anybody here think Stardust is going to have that kind of staying power?
For some moviegoers, though, it’s not enough to say that Stardust is no Princess Bride. “As a veteran movie goer who loves fantasy films and who can almost always find some reason to appreciate almost any big-budget film,” says novelist Deb Smith, “I gotta tell you that this one had me walking out. The plot had no focus, and the characters didn’t make me care… LadyHawke, warts and all, was still a very cool, very romantic film that has a very sentimental following among us romance writers.” And, yes, Smith counts Matthew Broderick’s wretched miscasting among those warts.