"Borat" headed for glorious U.S. box office
By Steve Gorman1 hour, 53 minutes ago
Borat may not be the biggest star of the U.S. multiplex this weekend, but the fictional Kazakh TV reporter is getting huge buzz, rave reviews and seems likely to "make benefit glorious box office" in the long run.
"Borat," starring British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen as the boorish, anti-Semitic alter ego he introduced to U.S. audiences on cable television's "Da Ali G Show," opened on Friday amid some of the most intense media hype of any film this year.
Leading online ticketing service Fandango.com reported brisk business for the film, whose full title is "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan."
As of noon on Friday, "Borat" accounted for 73 percent of the agency's advance ticket sales, and in a poll, 96 percent of Fandango customers said they planned to see the movie this weekend.
Industry experts said the faux documentary, featuring Cohen's Borat character on a road trip across the United States, would likely gross $8 million to $10 million and maybe as much as $15 million this weekend, a tidy sum for a film that cost only about $18 million to make.
That would make Cohen Britain's hottest comedy import to the U.S. big screen since Rowan Atkinson's "Bean" in 1997.
With two other big-studio pictures opening in North America this weekend, each in four times as many theaters, it will be tough for "Borat" to debut at No. 1. But the film is easily expected to end up in the top three or four.
"For a movie opening in fewer than 1,000 theaters, that's impressive," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracking service Exhibitor Relations Inc.
In a strategy calculated to build on strong word of mouth expected for the film, distributor 20th Century Fox scaled back its domestic release pattern to just 837 theaters and plans to expand next weekend to about 2,000.
By comparison, "Snakes on a Plane," another R-rated film that drew tremendous advance hype, opened in over 3,500 theaters in August and grossed $15.2 million its first weekend, dropping by nearly 60 percent at the box office the following week.
TARGETED RELEASE
This weekend, "Borat" will compete with "The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause" and animated adventure "Flushed Away," opening in 3,458 and 3,707 theaters, respectively.
By limiting the size of "Borat's" release, Fox is initially targeting Cohen's most devoted fans -- especially young, male moviegoers most likely to rush out in the first weekend and urge friends to see it, analysts said.
Fox spokesman Jeffrey Godsick said early ticket sales for "Borat" were "very strong" in all the major cities where it was showing, especially New York and Los Angeles.
Fox also is capitalizing on overwhelmingly warm reviews for "Borat" -- 95 percent of them positive, according to Web site rottentomatoes.com.
The film was helped by huge pre-release publicity from the protests of Kazakh authorities outraged by Cohen's portrait of their Central Asian country as a backward nation of drunken misogynists and racists.
Forty-three percent of those polled by Fandango said the Kazakh government's complaints about "Borat" heightened their interest in the movie, and 24 percent said they had not heard of Kazakhstan before.
If that's not enough to spark interest in the film, Borat himself makes the following plea to moviegoers in his heavily accented broken English: "If my film not success, I will be execute."
