HOLLYWOOD - The undead come out to play this weekend as the sickly sweet ghost story Dragonfly and the goth-rock vampire tale Queen of the Damned try to banish John Q to box office purgatory.With a string of expensive flops to his name, Kevin Costner turns to Liar Liar and The Nutty Professor director Tom Shadyac to revive his flagging fortunes. Unfortunately, Dragonfly isn't one of Shadyac's patented gross-out comedies but a silly, sentimental and serious-minded The Sixth Sense rip-off that won't allow Costner to regain the popularity that he enjoyed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He last tasted success with 1999's syrupy Message in a Bottle ($52.8 million) and has since endured the flops For Love of the Game ($35.1 million), Thirteen Days ($34.5 million) and 3,000 Miles to Graceland ($15.7 million).
As in The Sixth Sense, kids somehow see dead people. The dead person in question is Costner's recently deceased wife, a saintly doctor whose body was never recovered following a fatal bus accident in Venezuela. The kids claim they have a message for Costner from his wife. Too bad she's not telling him to find a new agent. Hard to believe, but Dragonfly manages to be even more disgustingly maudlin and vacuously uplifting than Shadyac's first stab at inspirational drama, Patch Adams.
Wrestling with ghosts proved successful for Bruce Willis and Nicole Kidman, but the preposterous and less-than-spooky Dragonfly won't resonate with audiences in the same manner as The Sixth Sense or The Others. Instead, Dragonfly will match the $11.2 million opening enjoyed in January by The Mothman Prophecies. Richard Gere's equally muddled foray into the unknown at least ended with a genuinely creepy note, no doubt helping The Mothman Prophecies to earn an OK $32.4 million through Monday. Dragonfly's preposterous ending might kill its chances of even cracking $30 million.
Dragonfly looks set to spoil Shadyac's perfect track record as a director. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Shadyac's directorial debut, turned Jim Carrey into a household name after it sleuthed its way to $72.2 million in 1994. Shadyac's The Nutty Professor remake, which revived Eddie Murphy's career, marked the first of three consecutive $100 million hits that continued with Liar Liar and Patch Adams. Shadyac might consider a well-advised return to comedy if Dragonfly indeed fails to take flight.
If audiences crave blood, they should turn to Queen of the Damned.
Rumors started to spread last year that Warner Bros. would send its Interview with the Vampire sequel straight to video in the wake of lousy word of mouth. Instead, Queen of the Damned arrives in theaters Friday with Warner Bros. in the unenviable position of marketing this adaptation of Anne Rice's novel without exploiting the tragic death of its star, Aaliyah.
Miramax's genre label Dimension faced the same problem in 1994 when it released The Crow one year after the accidental on-set death of star Brandon Lee. Dimension's subtle marketing campaign resulted in a $55 million smash.
Aaliyah completed filming the role of the Egyptian vampire Akasha months before the August airplane crash in the Bahamas that killed her. She had already made a successful acting debut in the Shakespearean-inspired martial arts thriller Romeo Must Die ($55.9 million), and had been cast in The Matrix sequels, The Matrix: Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions.
Queen of the Damned isn't likely to match the $36.3 million that Interview with the Vampire sucked out of audiences during its opening weekend in November 1996. Tom Cruise, as the Vampire Lestat, led the pretty-boy cast of Interview with the Vampire that included Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas and Christian Slater. This sequel--based on the third book in the Rice-penned series--instead features the relatively unknown Irish actor Stuart Townsend as Lestat, now a rock star whose music awakens Queen Akasha from a 6,000-year slumber. (Wes Bentley and Josh Hartnett were both reportedly approached to star as Lestat, but both declined to take on the daunting challenge of replacing Cruise.)
The combination of the literary series' hardcore followers, Aaliyah's faithful fans and the curiosity surrounding her final film should result in a $13 million opening and a $35 million total, about one-third of the $105.6 million that Interview with the Vampire settled for after a fast fade.