Dreamgirls opening even more sensational than expected!

"Early reports indicate that Dreamgirls may have made a bigger splash than anyone expected when it opened on Monday in 852 theaters. Some venues reportedly added midnight screenings and allocated additional screens to the film after selling out existing tickets a day in advance. L.A. Weekly columnist Nikki Finke wrote on Monday, "The target audience had been African-Americans, gays and upscale whites. But now the movie is playing bigger than expected with white audiences in general. Anecdotes are starting to come in of audiences cheering and clapping and crying." While Finke wrote that the movie was originally expected to do about $4.5 million in business on Monday, ShowBIZ Data estimates that the take is closer to 8.4 million."
Huge

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Updated On: 12/26/06 at 10:04 PM

I wonder how the soundtrack is doing?

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It already is.

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I agree. A wise theater choice for this one makes a difference.

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My second "mainstream" viewing was a non-digital projection at The Grove in LA (after having seen the pristine 2K Digital print at the Arclight's Cinerama Dome for the road show).

As much as I enjoyed the "perfect" way we saw it at the Dome (with perfect seats, perfect projection and perfect sound), I preferred the more cinematic-looking NON-digital print at the Grove. That one looked more like a MOVIE... and less like an animated video game... which tends to happen (for me) when something is projected as entirely "digital." Colors are over-saturated, contour lines are razor-sharp, atmosphere (aka noise) is almost entirely removed, depth is "flattened out," and while it comes off as very eye-popping on impact, it loses a bit of reality in the long run that I definitely miss.

Perhaps it was because of this particular film... but I don't think so. I just prefer the standard film transfer I saw to the pristine sheen of a digital transfer.


EDIT: I will add this about the sound... in BOTH venues where I saw Dreamgirls (the Arclight AND the Grove), there were sections of the audio that I thought were poorly mixed, in that dialogue levels were just TOO LOW. They were being drowned out by underscoring, effects, etc. I noticed that several times in BOTH theatres. And it bugged me.

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Updated On: 12/27/06 at 11:00 AM

The Grove is my favorite place to see any movie in LA, outside of the Arclight (which is just too damn pricey for most movies).

EDIT: I'm not talking about studio screening rooms, guild theatres or the Academy, which I also go to regularly. I'm talking about mainstream movie theatres in LA.

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Updated On: 12/27/06 at 11:05 AM

Ergh! The sound was absolutely terrible. I wish could have seen it at one of the roadshow locations.

I am very pleased with how well the movie did at the box office and how well audiences are receiving it.

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the local Borders was sold out of the soundtrack, so I bought the OBCR which I love!

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I've been listening to the original cast recording of the movie all evening.

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Updated On: 12/27/06 at 11:07 PM

Hm, strange. The theater I was in had very good sound.

Come to think of it, I might get Surround Sound when I get the DVD. :]

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The film is certainly doing well, but does anyone else think that waiting a couple weeks to release it to the maximum amount of theaters might be stretching it just a little bit too much? I wonder if people will still be that interested by then. The hype around the film has already been building for a quite a while. It'll be fascinating to see how things go from here.

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Updated On: 12/31/06 at 10:18 PM

My guess is that they are opening it wide on the 19th to coincide with the Golden Globe Awards (Jan 15) and the Oscar Nominations (Jan 23)

According to the article on the Main Board, it's now going into wide release on the 12th (1,800 screens). So they moved it up.

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