Who Sank Universal Studio's Battleship?

Battleship is out in theatres this weekend. It's an actual honest to goodness big budget movie based upon the old Hasbro children’s game. The one where you call out points on  a grid and mark your hits and misses with red and white pegs. Someone -- well actually several people -- over at Universal Studios thought this was somehow a good enough idea for a $200 million budgeted film. Seriously.

Then they realized it wasn’t a very good idea at all. In fact, it was actually a really bad one. So they decided to make the film the naval equivalent of Transformers by making it about humans and their battleships against giant alien seafaring Transformers -- er, Battleships. Seriously.

Then they decided to follow the Michael Bay Transformers model of filmmaking by casting a hot but talentless swimsuit model instead of an actual competent actress as the female lead so they can show offer her cleavage, butt and legs while she thinks she’s showing off her acting chops. Plus some other male actors. And Rihanna. Seriously.

Then they decided they’d better put in some real actors and somehow got the great Alexander Skarsgard and the even greater LIAM freakin’ NEESON into the movie. Seriously.

Then they realized that with their inevitable horrid reviews (36% on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing) and the North American opening still close to The Avengers that they would be crushed at the box office so they opened around the rest of the world first and amazingly managed to make $220 million worldwide and recover the movie’s budget so every  penny made stateside is now pure profit. Seriously.

Well the movie opened this past Thursday at midnight and earned a paltry $420,000 in North America which doesn’t bode well at all for its future as The Avengers is going to end up the number one North American movie for the third week in a row and looks to make a record $55 million in its third weekend, which would be yet another record-setter for the unstoppable superheroes. Both of these movies cost upwards of $200 million. The Avengers has already made a billion worldwide. Battleship will be lucky to pull in whatever profit it can this weekend and will sink right after.

Who sank your Battleship, Universal? Marvel’s The Avengers did.At lesat you have company in with Dark Shadows and The Dictator going down with you to the bottom of the box office ocean.