Looks like it’ll take more than teary interviews by pals like Jodie Foster to bring folks to a Mel Gibson movie. Mel’s long-awaited The Beaver finally made it to 22 theater screens this weekend, scoring about as much per-screen as the similarly budgeted Something Borrowed—except that Kate Hudson rom-com is playing at nearly 3,000 screens (and not doing so amazing either). The Beaver is still scheduled to expand its scope next week, but the numbers suggest people aren’t lining up see Mel win back his family after an emotional breakdown with the help of a puppet. After all, it’s not like the puppet kept him from splitting with his long-time wife Robyn and getting violent with ex-girlfriend/babymama Oksana Grigorieva…drama that already delayed the film’s release.
Execs at Summit Entertainment are blaming the subject matter, rather than Mel, for the mediocre numbers (“As it turns out, I think the film is more of an art-house speciality kind of movie than a broader commercial film…I don’t know whether it’s going to transcend that art-house audience”), though it’s debatable whether the film even scored that “art-house audience.” Mel’s next movie, How I Spent My Summer Vacation, about a career criminal who teams up with a young boy in a Mexican prison, has yet to be given a US release date, so who knows if the art-house will even get to see it.
