Weak reviews, cranky fans, a pirated version: none of it mattered.

“X-Men Origins: Wolverine” kicked off the spring-summer blockbuster season with $87 million in ticket sales, continuing the year’s box office boom and keeping a core franchise alive for 20th Century Fox and Marvel Entertainment.

The fourth in a series that began in 2000 with “X-Men,” “Wolverine” stopped short of the performance by another superhero movie, “Iron Man,” which took in about $98.6 million when it was released by Paramount Pictures and Marvel on the same weekend last year.

But the new Fox film, which was directed by Gavin Hood with Hugh Jackman in the lead role, became an instant hit in the face of obstacles that have included boycott calls — some of them set off by Fox’s earlier threat to block Warner Brothers from releasing “Watchmen” in a legal dispute — and a still-smarting leak that put a pirated version of “Wolverine” on the Internet a month before its release.

The performance was particularly impressive in that “Wolverine” opened without the advantage of the supersize Imax screenings — demand for the big-screen technology has exceeded supply — that have boosted the opening weekend of fantasy thrillers like “The Dark Knight.”

“If you had to nail it down to one thing, it would be the affection and appetite for Hugh and the character he’s created,” said Chris Aronson, a senior vice-president of Fox’s distribution unit, said of the resilience shown by “Wolverine.” Mr. Aronson called the concern over the online leak “agonizing” and added that even as late as Saturday night a heavily viewed NBA playoff game had bitten into audiences in Chicago and Boston. And the critics did not help: one of many to pan the film, A. O. Scott, writing in The New York Times, said it showed that the superhero genre “is suffering from serious imaginative fatigue.”

But an unexpectedly large female audience — nearly 50 percent of the total — and a possible return of fans who were distracted by the basketball game boosted Fox’s expectations for the film’s continued strength. Returns from 101 foreign territories reached about $73 million, to give the film a global box office take of about $160 million, Mr. Aronson said.

“Ghosts of Girlfriends Past,” a romantic comedy with Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Garner, took in about $15.3 million to place No. 2 for Warner Brothers and its New Line Cinema division, according to a studio estimate.

Last weekend’s No. 1 film, “Obsessed,” a thriller from Sony Pictures and its Screen Gems unit, placed third this weekend, with about 12.2 million in sales, and a total of $47 million since opening on April 24.

Other pictures in the Top 5 were “17 Again” from Warner Brothers and New Line, with about $6.4 million in ticket sales and $48.5 million since opening on April 17, and “Monsters vs. Aliens” from Paramount and DreamWorks Animation, with $5.8 million, and $182.4 million since its release on March 27.

In all, the weekend’s top 12 films took in about $152.2 million, up about 1 percent from $150.7 million last year, when “Iron Man” — which eventually took in more than $318 million to become last year’s second biggest hit, after “The Dark Knight” — turned in an exceptionally strong performance, according to the Hollywood.com Box-Office tracking service.

For the year to date, the total box office is about $3.2 billion, up 16.4 percent from about $2.8 billion last year, Hollywood.com Box-Office said.

The continuing surge in ticket sales appears to show an audience drawn to diversion in tough economic times and the growing power of the ultra-large-screen and 3-D technologies that pulled viewers to “Monsters vs. Aliens” and will support a number of forthcoming pictures, including the science-fiction thriller “Avatar,” expected from Fox and the filmmaker James Cameron later this year.

‘Wolverine’ Gives X-Men the Weekend’s Box Office Lead

The 81st Academy Awards ceremony was held by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to honor its selection of the best films of 2008 on Sunday, February 22, 2009, at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, California. The ceremony was televised in the United States on ABC and on Sky Movies in High definition in the United Kingdom. Australian performer Hugh Jackman hosted the ceremony for the first time. Academy Award-nominated producer Laurence Mark produced with Academy Award-winning writer/director Bill Condon as executive producer.

Slumdog Millionaire won eight awards, the most of the evening, including Best Picture and Best Director (Danny Boyle). The Curious Case of Benjamin Button led the nominations with a total of 13 while Slumdog Millionaire received ten, The Dark Knight and Milk received eight, and Doubt, The Reader, and Frost/Nixon each received five. The animated film WALL-E, the winner for Best Animated Feature, received six nominations, tying it with Beauty and The Beast for the most nominated animated film in Oscar history.

The Academy hoped to rework the ceremony through an entirely new production team sworn to secrecy. The ceremony received recent controversies prior to its broadcast, most notably the Academy’s alleged snubbing of films such as The Dark Knight, Doubt, and WALL·E, threats from a possible Screen Actors Guild strike, and fear of the Oscar telecast’s recent low viewership.

Winners of major awards

Feature films

Best Picture : Slumdog Millionaire :  Christian Colson

• Slumdog Millionaire is a 2008 British drama film directed by Danny Boyle, with co-director (India) Loveleen Tandan, and written by Simon Beaufoy. It is an adaptation of the Boeke Prize winning and Commonwealth Writers’ Prize nominated novel Q and A by Indian author and diplomat Vikas Swarup. Set and filmed in …

Best Foreign Language Film  : Departures – Japan  : Yojiro Takita

• Departures (Okuribito) is a 2008 Japanese film directed by Yojiro Takita. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2009 Oscars. Plot Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki), a cellist in an orchestra in Tokyo, loses his job because of dissolution of the orchestra. After quitting as a professional cellist, …

Best Documentary Feature :  Man on Wire  : Simon Chinn

• Man on Wire is a 2009 Academy Award-winning documentary film directed by James Marsh. The film chronicles Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center and is based on Philippe Petit’s book, To Reach the Clouds, which has recently been released in paperback …

Best Animated Feature  : WALL·E  : Andrew Stanton

• WALL-E is a 2008 computer-animated science fiction film produced by Pixar Animation Studios. The film was directed by Andrew Stanton. It follows the story of a robot named WALL-E who is designed to clean up a waste covered Earth far in the future. He eventually falls in love with another …

Directing

• Best Director  Danny Boyle  Slumdog Millionaire

Acting

• Best Actor in a Leading Role  : Sean Penn :  Milk
• Best Actress in a Leading Role  : Kate Winslet  : The Reader
• Best Actor in a Supporting Role : Heath Ledger : The Dark Knight
• Best Actress in a Supporting Role : Penélope Cruz :  Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Writing

• Best Writing – Original Screenplay  : Dustin Lance Black : Milk
• Best Writing – Adapted Screenplay :  Simon Beaufoy  : Slumdog Millionaire

Special honors

• Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award  : Jerry Lewis  : Comedic film & Humanitarian Work

Other Awards

• Best Art Direction – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Donald Graham Burt, Victor J. Zolfo
• Best Cinematography – Slumdog Millionaire – Anthony Dod Mantle
• Best Costume Design – The Duchess – Michael O’Connor
• Best Documentary Feature – Man on Wire
• Best Documentary Short – Smile Pinki – Megan Mylan
• Best Animated Short – La Maison En Petits Cubes – Kunio Kato
• Best Live Action Short – Toyland (Spielzeugland)
• Best Film Editing – Slumdog Millionaire – Chris Dickens
• Best Makeup – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Greg Cannom
• Best Original Score – Slumdog Millionaire – A. R. Rahman
• Best Original Song – “Jai Ho” from Slumdog Millionaire – A. R. Rahman (music), Gulzar (lyrics)
• Best Sound Editing – The Dark Knight – Richard King
• Best Sound Mixing – Slumdog Millionaire – Resul Pookutty, Richard Pryke, Ian Tapp
• Best Visual Effects – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Eric Barba, Steve Preeg, Burt Dalton, Craig Barron

Nominations

The nominees for the 81st Academy Awards were announced live on Thursday, January 22, 2009, at 5:38 a.m. PST (13:38 UTC) by Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences president Sid Ganis and Oscar-winning actor Forest Whitaker at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in the Academy’s Beverly Hills headquarters. The winners were announced during the awards ceremony on Sunday, February 22, 2009, at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, California. Jerry Lewis was honored with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.

Multiple nominations and awards

The following 15 films received multiple nominations.

• 13 nominations: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
• 10 nominations: Slumdog Millionaire
• 8 nominations:  The Dark Knight and Milk
• 6 nominations:  WALL-E
• 5 nominations:  Doubt, Frost/Nixon, and The Reader
• 3 nominations:  Changeling and Revolutionary Road
• 2 nominations:  The Duchess, Frozen River, Iron Man, Wanted, and The Wrestler

The following four films received multiple awards.

• 8 awards: Slumdog Millionaire
• 3 awards: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
• 2 awards: The Dark Knight
• 2 awards: Milk

81st Academy Awards – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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While the film’s triumphs at the 81st annual Academy Awards marked an amazing outcome for a movie filled with subtitles, scenes of torture and a Bollywood dance sequence, the wins also cemented the reputation of distributor Fox Searchlight, which has become Hollywood’s top advocate of the kind of daring works that movie studios have all but abandoned.

Director Danny Boyle’s fictional account of a Mumbai orphan’s surprising winning streak on India’s version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” also won Oscars for direction, adapted screenplay, cinematography, editing, original score, original song and sound mixing.

The wins for the film — produced by a British company, co-financed by a French distributor and made by a largely Indian cast and crew — dramatized the global compass reading of contemporary movie production, as other top Oscar winners showed.

The best supporting actress winner was Spain’s Penelope Cruz for “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”; Australian actor Heath Ledger was posthumously named best supporting actor for “The Dark Knight”; and British star Kate Winslet won best actress for “The Reader.” The only acting winner with a U.S. birth certificate: Sean Penn, who played the title character in “Milk.”

Host Hugh Jackman opened the broadcast with a song and dance routine about the economic recession, and though he didn’t reference Hollywood cost-cutting specifically, belt-tightening was very much a part of the Oscar ceremony backdrop.

In a show business shakeup that has cost scores of film executives their jobs and left numerous movies in limbo, studios are scaling back not only on provocative dramas but also on the companies they established to produce and distribute them.

In the last year, Warner Bros. closed its two specialty film divisions, Warner Independent Pictures (the original distributor of “Slumdog Millionaire”) and Picturehouse, while Paramount closed the doors of its Paramount Vantage unit. ThinkFilm, a leading distributor of nonfiction films, has vanished, and the Weinstein Co. has scaled way back.

At the same time, the big movie studios are steering clear of highbrow literary dramas, aiming their resources at mass-appeal works including family-friendly animation, superhero stories and established franchises such as James Bond and Harry Potter.

As others have ditched movies that require patient marketing to build grass-roots audience interest — “Slumdog Millionaire” debuted in just 10 theaters last November and didn’t reach its widest national release until last weekend — Fox Searchlight has become Hollywood’s unequaled home for films made outside the normal studio channels.

A tiny cog in Rupert Murdoch’s global News Corp. media conglomerate, Fox Searchlight not only was able to steer “Slumdog Millionaire” to its multiple Oscar wins, but also turned it into a solid box-office hit, with domestic gross set to pass $100 million.

“It’s a triumph for this kind of film,” Boyle said backstage, minutes after he thanked Fox Searchlight from the lectern of the Kodak Theatre.

By far the most successful of the studio-owned specialty film divisions, Fox Searchlight had never before won the top Oscar, although it had best picture finalists three of the last four years with a varied slate of original, audience-pleasing works: 2007′s “Juno,” 2006′s “Little Miss Sunshine” and 2004′s “Sideways.”

While the best picture prize will make a nice ornament for Fox Searchlight’s lobby, the trophy also serves as a validation of the company’s patient, disciplined approach to making and distributing movies from outside the studio system — even as the company’s peers are folding their tents.

Some of these companies were done in by profligate spending and steep overhead, which Fox Searchlight has consistently avoided. The company refuses to pay its actors more than $500,000 — often a tiny fraction of their standard, multimillion-dollar salaries — and carries a staff of about 75.

Slumdog’ strikes it rich with 8 Oscar wins

Premise

Set roughly twenty years before X-Men, the film will focus on Wolverine’s violent past, and his early encounters with William Stryker (Danny Huston). The Weapon X program and his interactions with other mutants will be explored, including his complex relationship with Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber).

Production

Development

David Benioff, a comic book fan, pursued the project for almost three years before he was hired to write the script in October 2004. In preparing to write the script, he reread Barry Windsor-Smith’s “Weapon X” story (1991), as well as Chris Claremont and Frank Miller’s 1982 limited series on the character (his favorite storyline). Jackman collaborated on the script, which he wanted to be more of a character piece compared with the previous X-Men films. Benioff aimed for a “darker and a bit more brutal” story, writing it with an R rating in mind, although he acknowledged the film’s final tone would rest with the producers and director. Jackman did not see the need to make the film R.

Deadpool had been developed for his own film by Reynolds and David S. Goyer at New Line Cinema in 2003, but the project fell apart as they focused on Blade Trinity and an aborted spin-off. Benioff wrote the character into the script in a manner Jackman described as fun, but would also deviate from some of his traits. Similarly, Gambit was a character who the filmmakers had tried to put in the previous X-Men films. Jackman liked Gambit because he is a “loose cannon” like Wolverine, stating their relationship echoes that of Wolverine and Pyro in the original trilogy. David Ayer contributed to the script. Benioff finished his draft in October 2006, and Jackman stated there would be a year before shooting, as he was scheduled to start filming Australia (2008) during 2007. Before the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike began, James Vanderbilt and Scott Silver were hired for a last-minute rewrite.

Gavin Hood was announced as director of the project in July 2007 for a 2008 release. Previously, X-Men and X2 director Bryan Singer and X-Men: The Last Stand director Brett Ratner were interested in returning to the franchise, while Alexandre Aja and Len Wiseman also wanted the job. Zack Snyder, who was approached for The Last Stand, turned down this film because he was directing Watchmen. Jackman saw parallels between Logan and the main character in Tsotsi. Hood explained that while he was not a comic book fan, he “realized that the character of Wolverine, I think his great appeal lies in the fact that he’s someone who in some ways, is filled with a great deal of self-loathing by his own nature and he’s constantly at war with his own nature”. The director described the film’s themes as focusing on Wolverine’s inner struggle between his animalistic savagery and noble human qualities. Hood enjoyed the previous films, but set out to give the spin-off a different feel. In October, Fox announced a May 1, 2009 release date and the X-Men Origins prefix.

Sequel

Hood speculated that there could be a sequel, which may be set in Japan. Such a location was the subject of Claremont and Miller’s series, which was not in the first film as Jackman felt “what we need to do is establish who (Logan) is and find out how he became Wolverine”. Jackman stated the Claremont-Miller series is his favorite Wolverine story. He added another Wolverine film would be a follow-up rather than continuing on from X-Men: The Last Stand. The inclusion of Deadpool and Gambit also leads to the possibilities of their own spin-offs.

Other Information

• Also Known As : Wolverine
• Genre : Action, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Thriller
• Release date : Australia & New Zealand: April 30, 2009, North America & United Kingdom: May 1, 2009
• Country : United States, New Zealand, Australia
• Filming Locations : Arcadia Station, Glenorchy, Otago, New Zealand
• Company : Donners’ Company
• Language : English
• Preceded by : X-Men: The Last Stand
• Followed by : X-Men Origins: Magneto

Cast and Credits

• Directed by : Gavin Hood
• Produced by : Hugh Jackman, Lauren Shuler Donner, Ralph Winter, Avi Arad
• Written by : David Benioff
• Starring : Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Danny Huston
• Music by : Harry Gregson-Williams
• Cinematography : Donald McAlpine
• Editing by : Nicolas De Toth
• Distributed by : 20th Century Fox

Trivia

• Zack Snyder and Bryan Singer turned down the chance to direct the film. Snyder was too busy developing Watchmen (2009), while Singer was too busy with other projects. Snyder also was interested in making the film R-rated, while Hugh Jackman and Lauren Shuler Donner wanted to settle on a PG-13 rating.

Links

• Official website
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine at MySpace, with official trailer
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine at the Internet Movie Database
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine at Allmovie
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine at Yahoo! Movies
• X-men Origins: Wolverine at Wikipedia.org