'EVAN ALMIGHTY'S' WEAK PERFORMANCE IS "FIRST MAJOR POTHOLE" IN SEQUEL-HEAVY SUMMER (LAT, WSJ)

By Nancy Vialatte

��Evan Almighty� could be the first big-budget bomb of the summer after opening to $32.1 million in U.S. and Canadian weekend ticket sales, based on Sunday's estimate from Universal Pictures.� So says The Los Angeles Times which is closely echoed by The Wall Street Journal which says, ��Evan's� almighty stumble is the first major pothole in Hollywood's sequel-filled summer. Universal still hopes the film can gain momentum.�

The LAT puts the modern-day Noah's Ark tale at a cost of more than $250 million to produce and market; Universal�s most expensive production this year.

Universal co-chair Marc Shmuger told the WSJ, "We were hoping to get off to a faster start. I think there are some movies that don't necessarily get off to the biggest start, but word-of-mouth is so strong that the appeal spreads and grows the longer it's in the marketplace."

"It's a really good launch to a film that's going to be talked about with friends and family," said Nikki Rocco, the studio's president of domestic distribution. She said 95% of ticket buyers surveyed rated the picture "excellent" or "very good," boding well for word of mouth. (LAT)

Still, the studio and financing partner, Relativity Media, are hoping the film holds up well enough that they can come out unscathed, notes the LAT.

According to the WSJ, Universal executives compared the launch of "Evan" with last year's hit Fox movie "Night at the Museum," which opened to $30.4 million and went on to gross more than $250 million at the box office.

And yet, Hollywood's reliance on third, fourth and fifth installments of their biggest franchises has been showing signs of strain even before �Evan.�

May's big blockbuster "threequels" -- "Spider-Man 3," "Shrek the Third" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" -- are all expected to fall short of the last installments in those series at the domestic box office. Some of that drop is being supplemented by healthy international receipts, and the films are all expected to be strongly profitable. (WSJ)

The domestic performance of the films may be a sign that audiences are growing fatigued with overly familiar offerings. One big problem is that the sheer volume of May sequels caused gridlock at the theaters by opening too close to each other. (WSJ)

"Shrek the Third" didn't do as well as "Shrek 2" domestically, but is on track to outperform its predecessor internationally. "We did better than we expected, but there's no question �Pirates� took a piece out of our back-end staying power," Jeffrey Katzenberg told The Journal. He added: "Irrespective of how �Pirates� did, they cannibalized us."

"Evan Almighty" should have had it easier. It was given plenty of distance from May's big three, and some breathing room before Pixar's animated "Ratatouille" and next month's "Transformers," "The Simpsons Movie " and the fifth "Harry Potter" film. (WSJ)

But the film -- which has been hung with the unfortunate label of being the most expensive comedy ever made -- will likely wind up a cautionary tale that shows how perilous it can be for studios to pursue sequels at all costs. (WSJ)

While industry officials and observers have downgraded earlier estimates of a record-breaking $4 billion summer, they aren't yawning at the money being brought in. "The films that front-loaded the summer were the films that open big and drop off but still make a heck of a lot of money," says Paul Dergarabedian, president of Media by Numbers LLC, a Encino, Calif., box-office tracking firm. (WSJ)

And, although it fell shy of analysts' predictions, "Evan Almighty" was number 1 at the weekend box office.