MUMBAI: Indian producer Ashok Amritraj was hoping to take second place at the box office at the close of the opening weekend for his Premonition, but 300 and Wild Hogs held firm to their first and second spots respectively, dropping his film to third place.
Nevertheless, the Sony film not only gave Sandra Bullock her best opening ever, with $18 million in ticket sales from 2,831 theatres at the end of the weekend, but the studio also recovered its $20 million negative costs in the first three days, reports say.
According to www.Hollywood.tv founder Sheeraz Hasan, the audiences comprised 66 per cent female and 34 per cent male. No doubt it was a date film, since 61 per cent of the moviegoers were 25 and older.
In the supernatural thriller, Sandra Bullock stars as Linda Hanson, a woman who has a perfect life – a beautiful house, a loving husband and two adorable daughters. But her tranquil existence is shattered when she finds out that her husband has died in a car accident.
The next morning, Linda awakens to find him alive and well and asks herself, Was it all a dream? Linda soon realizes that it wasn’t and now has to race against time and fate to keep everything she and her husband have built together from falling apart.
The critics, however, have been merciless. ABC’s Joel Siegel, in his review for Good Morning America, even slammed the film’s title. "It’s like naming a car Lemon," he said.
In her review for New York Daily News, Elizabeth Weitzman thought that "[We] sense our own premonition coming on: If [Bullock] doesn’t start choosing her projects a little more wisely, she may wake up one day to the scary realities of squandered opportunity."
While Chris Kaltenbach in his review for the Baltimore Sun said that "seeing the end of ‘Premonition’ before the beginning could save everyone a lot of time," the Toronto Globe and Mail’s Stephen Cole called the film "inescapable dull" but had his own premonition that it will be the top film at the box office this weekend.
Eleanor Ringel Gillespie shared Cole’s opinion. In her review for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution she said that Premonition "is probably two-thirds of a good movie, and sometimes that’s enough. But I have a, well, premonition it may not be, especially when it comes to those all-important opening-weekend grosses."
