HOLLYWOOD - The new school year's about to begin, but that won't stop teens from hanging 10 with Michelle Rodriguez.In Blue Crush, Rodriguez and Kate Bosworth star as Oahu hotel maids who live in a beach shack and love to surf. The best of them is Bosworth's character, who receives an invitation to compete in a usually all-male surfing tournament.
Blue Crush crashes into 3,000-plus theaters at the end of a summer that has seen very little in the way of comedies and dramas aimed specifically at teens. That should give Blue Crush a distinct advantage over this weekend's other wide release, Eddie Murphy's The Adventures of Pluto Nash.
Girls should embrace Blue Crush's empowering themes while boys will doubtless go merely to drool over the film's bikini-clad stars. Women excelling in a traditionally male environment worked for the moronic Coyote Ugly, which demonstrated surprising endurance in summer 2000.
With Rodriguez's star on the rise following The Fast and the Furious and Resident Evil, Blue Crush will likely match Coyote Ugly's $17.3 million opening and $60.7 million total. Such an opening would come as welcome news to director John Stockwell, whose coming-of-age romance crazy/beautiful wooed a mere $16.9 million last summer.
Rodriguez could put up a strong fight against her Fast and the Furious co-star Vin Diesel for box office supremacy if too many teens abandon skydiving for surfboarding. Diesel's extreme sports-driven Bondian spy romp xXxexploded with a loud $44.5 million opening--better than any 007 offerings--and has $58.2 million through Wednesday. In comparison, The Fast and the Furious zoomed off with a $40 million opening and clocked up $54 million by its sixth day in release. Sony Pictures' willingness to pay the up-and-coming Diesel $10 million for xXx now looks like a wise investment. Audiences seem to regard Diesel as part of a new generation of action heroes that includes The Rock.
xXx will likely experience the same second-weekend erosion of 50 percent that dragged down The Fast and the Furious. That also would be in line with the second-weekend declines of Austin Powers in Goldmember and Signs. With a second-weekend haul of around $22 million, and a possible 10-day tally of $85 million, Diesel's spy games should come close to matching The Fast and the Furious' $144.5 million total. So, expect to see Diesel tattooed and ready for action in 2004 with his xXx sequel.
Regardless, neither xXx nor Blue Crush will be able to pump up the box office, which has lagged behind last year's corresponding weekends for one month.