But it’s possible that two days after Halloween was too early for moviegoers to get into a festive mood, even if holiday commercials are already popping up on TV. There’s no guarantee “Nutcracker,” which is based on one of the most famous Christmas stories ever, would have performed better if it had been released closer to the 25th of December. So why did “Nutcracker” fall apart like a poorly constructed toy? Here are our factors: It’s the worst opening for a wide Disney release since the $18 million opening of “The BFG” two years ago, and the third misfire for Disney this year alongside “A Wrinkle in Time,” which made $132 million against a $103 million budget, and “Solo,” which was the worst-performing “Star Wars” film ever with just $392 million grossed worldwide. “Obviously, while we try to put all our films in the best position to succeed, some might not connect as much as we hope,” said Disney domestic distribution head Cathleen Taff.Īlso Read: 'Bohemian Rhapsody' Is the Box Office Champion With $51 Million Opening With family films like “The Grinch,” “Fantastic Beasts” and the aforementioned “Ralph” headlining the rest of the November slate, all signs point to “Nutcracker” dropping down the charts very quickly in the weeks to come. Not in this movie, which slows to a crawl in the act of boring you breathless.Three weeks from now, Disney should be back to making box office money hand over fist with “Ralph Breaks the Internet,” but it’s always noteworthy when the top studio in Hollywood suffers a flop as big as “Nutcracker and the Four Realms.”įilmed on a pricey $130 million budget, “Nutcracker” has posted a domestic opening this weekend of just $20 million and $58.5 million worldwide. Clara is told that the four realms represent a parallel world where time moves faster. What this Nutcracker offers is so overproduced, so mechanical and so indigestibly whimsical that it won’t just be two-year-olds who want to puke it up. Grant)? Or how about Sugar Plum, who seems to be having a squeaky-voiced meltdown in the welcome distraction of Keira Knightley’s helium-high portrayal of toxic cotton candy.Īny description of what follows, including a battle of tin soldiers, clowns on the attack and a swarm of killer mice, would only evoke other, much better films such as The Wizard of Oz, The Chronicles of Narnia and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Or maybe it’s flower-covered Hawthorne (Eugenio Derbez) or icy Shiver (Richard E. It seems like Mother Ginger (Helen Mirren, reduced to mugging) is evil. Hope you like headache-inducing vistas that can leave you in a digitally induced coma! And good luck figuring out why the leaders of the realms are at war with each other! Searching for answers, Clara teams up with a Nutcracker soldier named Phillip (Jayden Fowora-Knight), and an animated mouse. If only he could zap audiences out of the multiplex.Īny hope that things will pick up are quickly dashed when Clara enters “the four realms,” where it turns out her mum was once queen. Frustrating, yes? So is mum’s note: “Everything you need is inside.” At the party, the young woman seeks out her godfather Drosselmeyer ( Morgan Freeman in paycheck mode), a toymaker who zaps her into another dimension. Clara gets an egg-shaped box with no key to open it. Not to mention that her father insists she wear dead mum’s dress - creepy, right? Mum has left gifts behind for her children. Her mum has recently died (there goes Disney again with the dead parent thing) and neither Clara nor her siblings are in the mood to follow their mopey dad (Matthew Macfadyen) to a lavish Christmas ball. It’s Christmas Eve in in Victorian London, and clever Clara Stahlbaum (Mackenzie Foy), the 14-year-old embodiment of female empowerment, is in a funk. After that, composer James Newton Howard smothers the sounds of this perennial seasonal favorite in aural swill. Dance fans can look forward to a pair of all-too-brief appearances, including one over the end credits, from ballet great Misty Copeland. What we have here is simply a botch job with two directors - Lasse Hallstrom ( My Life as a Dog) for starters and Joe Johnston ( Jurassic Park III) for reshoots - and absolutely no personality of its own. Hoffman and a ballet with music by Tchaikovsky. What went wrong? Where to begin?!? On the surface, this Disney debacle seems like a no-brainer for the holidays: It’s an 1816 gothic fairytale by E.T.A. Slow torture for kids and grownups alike, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms gives a bad name to the very concept of family entertainment.
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