Entertainment

MOVIES: Box-office totals rise as film goes into heartland

10:33 AM CST on Thursday, January 5, 2006

By CHRIS VOGNAR / The Dallas Morning News

The love-struck gorilla and the Christ-like lion are the season's heavyweights, leading King Kong and The Chronicles of Narnia in a toe-to-toe fight for box-office supremacy. But a more intriguing battle is being waged down on the prairie, where the screens are scarcer and mass popularity is less certain.

The question: How is Brokeback Mountain playing in the cinematic heartland?

The answer: So far, so good.

In December, Focus Features released Brokeback Mountain to rave reviews and the highest domestic per-screen average ever recorded: $109,485 at each of five theaters. That's impressive, but those five theaters were in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, markets you might expect to pony up for an Oscar favorite about gay ranch hands.

Brokeback, like most movies without blockbuster name recognition and ad campaigns, has played in more theaters and smaller markets every week since its release. Last weekend it reached 269 screens, up 52 from the previous week, with a 61 percent jump in attendance. Variety reports stellar per-screen averages in such middle-America strongholds as Milwaukee ($32,000), Nashville, Tenn. ($37,000) and Columbus, Ohio ($40,000).

Over the four days of New Year's weekend, the movie pulled in $4.8 million for a 25-day total of $15 million. Brokeback is slated to add 120 screens on Friday.

Paul Dergarabedian, president of the box-office tracking company Exhibitor Relations, says the film appears to be built for the long haul.

"For it to sustain an $18,000 average in that many theaters says that it's doing well across the board," says Mr. Dergarabedian. "Even though it's not in the top 10, it's more about the per-theater average. It's doing great business."

Compare Brokeback's 269 screens to Narnia's 3,583 and you get some idea of the apples-and-oranges nature of the box-office race. Whereas you can't cast a stone without hitting a theater that shows Narnia and Kong (at 3,627 screens and counting), Brokeback is treading slowly into Red State America. But as Mr. Dergarabedian suggests, the early returns have been positive. When Brokeback opened in mid-December at the Cinemark Legacy 24 in Plano, it was the third-highest grosser in the multiplex.

Brokeback is also playing on one screen at the Grapevine Mills 30, where "it's performing very well," says Melanie Bell, AMC director of corporate communications. Of the 40 AMC theaters showing Brokeback in North America, she says, Grapevine Mills had the eighth-highest grosses.

Nominated for seven Golden Globes and featured on countless year-end top-10 lists, Brokeback Mountain is a Western love story about two ranch hands (Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal) who fall in love yet can't be together. But it doesn't play like what we traditionally consider a "gay movie," and its political content is strictly in the eye of the beholder.

"This is a film that we've now seen has resonance for people from every persuasion, walk of life and background," says James Schamus, the producer of Brokeback and co-president of Focus Features. "I think the audience is straight, gay, male, female."

But where it comes to marketing, Mr. Schamus has one group in mind.

"Our marketing is paying a lot of attention to women," he says. "It's a movie that reaches out and taps your empathy, so we want empathetic people to see the movie – e.g., women. It's also a great romance. The female audience has responded immediately and passionately to the romance of it, regardless of the gender of the protagonists."

There will always be those who refuse to see a movie with any kind of gay subject matter. But Brokeback may be poised to challenge widely held beliefs about the nation's moviegoers.

"On the face of it, it would appear to be the kind of film that wouldn't play as well in the middle of the country," says Mr. Dergarabedian. "But I don't want to sell that audience short. There are film buffs everywhere in this country. When you hear the kind of reviews and critical acclaim this film is getting ... at the end of the day it's a meritocracy and we have to look at it as a fine film."

E-mail cvognar@dallasnews.com