SPEED RACER BOMBS AT THE BOXOFFICE CRASHES & BURNS ON OPENING WEEKEND

Speed Racer is the first major casuality of the summer boxoffice season. The $200 million dollar kiddie action movie opened on May 9th and suffered from lackluster movie reviews and horrible boxoffice. Rotten Tomatoes gave the movie a low overall rating of 35% and a review that said the movie was "overloaded with headache-inducing effects, without a coherent script." We guess that Warner Bros. easily lost $400+ million dollars after P&A (prints and ads) expenditures. Ouch! Watch the Spill movie review of Speed Racer below.

We attended Speed Racer's red carpet premiere with the cast members Emile Hirsch and Christina Ricci in New York at the Tribeca Film Festival.  At the NY premiere we spoke to producer Joel Silver who expressed his excitement about working with the duo formerly known as the Wachowski brothers. Andy and Larry Wachowski directed the successful Matrix series.   Cinematical reported that Larry Wachowski underwent a sex change operation and is now known as "Lana"  Wachowski and was not going to speak to the press about his/her transformation until after the release of Speed Racer.

On top of that, sources say that Andy Wachowski would do all the press for the film as well for fear that the whole sex change thing could potentially harm the family-friendly film. source

Speed Racer producer Joel Silver told us that he was producing more movies for the Wachowski's to helm. We just wonder how these projects are going to pan out after Speed Racer was such a global boxoffice bomb. Andy and Larry Wachowski were plucked from obscurity by veteran film producer Joel Silver after their low budget independent film Bound.

It seems that the main complaint everyone had with Speed Racer is that the movie skewed too young with it's PG rating. The movie also didn't have a plot and relied too heavily on green screen CGI special effects. Hopefully, the studios will realize that people are making a choice about what they should spend their money on for entertainment.  Watch the 7 minute preview of Speed Racer below if you're brave. We've gotta warn you that the first 7 minutes include more than 2 flashbacks and really suck.

SATURDAY NOON UPDATE: I'm just receiving reports that Speed Racer also isn't doing well overseas where it opened day and date Friday in 30+ territories. Says a marketing and distribution source for another studio: "It is a disaster in the worst way. It was No. 6 in the UK and No. 9 in Germany and the numbers are horrific. Only Latin America showed signs of life -- but it was barely a pulse." I haven't seen any official international figures from Warner Bros yet. But the film was supposed to do better overseas where anime is a bigger draw than in the U.S.

Despite a wide release into 3,606 theaters, the anime actioner starring Emile Hirsh opened Friday with only $6.1 million (and some studios said it was merely $5.7M). Even if today's kiddie matinees generate some of the usual high-octane and the movie moves up a notch to second place, it still won't move Speed Racer out of the slow lane or approach Warner Bros' own expectations of a mid-$30s million debut (and that was down from a hoped-for $40 mil a few days before...).

The alarming fact is this film will struggle to even make $20 million for the weekend. At an estimated cost of at least $140 million (some sources put the final budget as high as $185 million), this family fare is yet another case of a studio letting talent run amok: the Wachowski siblings delivered a long, loud, and lousy movie. (The Industry scuttlebutt is that Warner Bros Pictures Group prez Jeff Robinov, a one-time agent, gave way too much power to his former clients. Of course, the success of their Matrix franchise justified a certain degree of autonomy.) The film's biggest handicap is its 2 hour, 15 minute, running time, bucking the current trend of kid movies clocking in at a mercifully short 90 to 100 minutes. And then there are the bad reviews: only 27% positive among the cream of the crop of Rotten Tomatoes film critics. In addition, the pic should have been "aged up": it plays too young and limits its audience by appealing mostly to little boys. According to the "Parents and Kids" premium tracking, Speed Racer was first choice among parents and boys aged 7 through 11. Unfortunately, the Warner Bros film will get creamed by the competition from the Disney/Walden blockbuster Narnia 2 opening next weekend. source