'Gladiator' Kills At The Box Office
A 30-year-old film genre was revived with a vengeance last weekend. CBS News Correspondent Laurie Hibberd has the story.
Audiences loved the return of the Gladiator. The numbers, $32.7 million according to Hollywood.com, show that it's by far the number one movie.
U-571 got knocked out of first, with $7.6 million. Frequency held on to the third spot, 6.5 million. The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas was the number four movie with $6.3 million and Where The Heart Is came in at $5 million.
If you went to see Gladiator this weekend, you saw some amazing special effects. The film combines classic old-style filmmaking with some cutting edge technical tricks.
Gladiator's crowd scenes are electrifying, turning hundreds of extras into thousands.
"In Spartacus they hired the Spanish army to showcase a thousand," said special effects supervisor John Nelson. "I think we shot around 250 extras and duplicated those into full capacity for about 3,000 other people. We had ultimate control over every single person in the crowd. We could have made them do the wave, you know. Which we didn't do, by the way."
To recreate the Coliseum as it was in ancient times, they built just the lower tier and did a "digital dance" that took care of the rest as accurately as possible.
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"No one really knows what the specifics of some of the things in Rome looked like because it was so long ago. We do know what the Coliseum looks like. You know the scale of it and the architectural design of it. And any viewer would know if it was right or wrong," said Nelson.
But this sword and sandal epic wasn't all eye candy. The tigers were very real.
"They were very dangerous. You had to be very careful in working with them, because you coul -- you know, you could blow it and get too close...and they could turn around and kill you," Nelson pointed out.
Surprisingly, women liked this movie even though they thought it would be a total guy flick. Thirty-five percent of audiences were women on Friday, but 45 percent were women on Saturday.
"They bought into the whole love story behind it," said Hibberd, pointing out that many women liked the idea of a strong man whose only wish was to return home to his wife and kid.
Top 10 at the box office:
- Gladiator, $32.6M
- U-571, $7.6M
- Frequency, $6.5M
- Flintstones, $6.3M
- Where The Heart Is, $5M
- Love And Basketball, $3.4M
- Keeping The Faith, $2.8M
- I Dreamed Of Africa, $2.5M
- Rules Of Engagement, $2.4M
- 28 Days, $2.3M
- U-571, $7.6M