Did Warner Bros. hire Carl Rove to sway the outcome of this weekend’s box office in their favor? Because last night the trades were reporting that UP grabbed the weekend’s number one spot with $ 44 million. However a different tune was sung today, with the Todd Phillips’ emotionally-stunted-male comedy The Hangover wearing the Weekend Box Office’s ruby-encrusted tiara, having bested the aforementioned Pixar flick by a cool mil.

Regardless, it was a good weekend for The Hollywood, what with two films north of the $40 million mark… hookers and blow for everyone! Everyone that is except Will Ferrell, whose Land of the Lost pulled in “only” $19 million – meager winnings for the once reigning king of emotionally-stunted manboy comedies. Still, there is a lesson to be learned here, and NO that lesson is not that Will Ferrell’s done like trucker hats and should be shuffled off to Jim Carrey’s Island of Comedy Wash Ups. But for you studio execs currently going over your development slates and realizing that it consists almost entirely or remakes, reboots, and adaptations it’s a lesson learned hard like “don’t drop the soap” on your first day of prison. Said lesson being, as I’ve only told y’all a gabazillion times, that just because you happen to have cherished memories of some TV show or cartoon or board game from your bed-wetting days DOESN’T mean turning said childhood memories into a $200 million feature film will result in anything but a career-ruining disaster. Nostalgia’s wonderful for staving off more painful ghosts from our past. Dad might’ve been a degenerate gambler, mom a philandering pill-head and Uncle Jerry might’ve touched us one too many times in the no-no place, but that’s okay because The Thundercats were go! and that made it all better, right? And that might’ve got you through Jr. High without going Columbine just fine, but now that you’re all growed up, stuffing those memories into a Thundercats lunch box is only gonna cost you your career, dipshit. So wise up.

Was The Hangover ever a comic book? A board game? An action figure equipped with kung-fu grip? Don’t think so. I also don’t recall there ever being an UP videogame or breakfast cereal. Yet these films managed to WIN BIG where your “branded” property failed. Why? Because the people – REAL people, not your fart-sniffing faux-liberal Hollywood friends — want FRESH and NEW. They don’t want the same old turds ground up and peppered with MSG then rammed down their throats, like you ASSUME they do because when you see ‘em driving in their Ford pick-ups on your way to Wine Country your self-important smugness informs you that these idiots will swallow anything you feed them. I mean look at them! Did those clothes come from Wal-Mart? And is that a “Support Our Troops” yellow ribbon I see? What rubes! I bet they even voted for John McCain!

Yeah, well those McCain-voting pick-up truck drivers are the ones lining your coffers, The Hollywood. And just because they don’t own hybrids or buy their organic kale at Whole Foods doesn’t mean they’ll eat any shit sandwich you’re selling just because it comes in a familiar wrapper. So next time some icky writer, producer or director comes to you with an original idea stop trying to figure out how to tie it to an existing intellectual property – especially if that property is fucking Bazooka Joe (the bubblegum wrapper comic strip that has the distinction of making Fred Basset funny by comparison). Take a chance. Try being innovative. The “creative” before the word “executive” on your business card wasn’t ALWAYS intended to be ironic, ya know.

Of course if you do take my advice I’ll have nothing left to write about. Which means I’ll have to re-direct all this pent up hostility somehow, like by maybe taking my old sniper rifle down to Third Street Promenade and taking random pop-shots at street mimes. But are mimes really worth their weight in shitty movies? I don’t think so.

Speaking of Bazooka Joe, here’s some leaked footage from the upcoming feature adaptation. Perhaps I was too quick to judge? Because this actually looks pretty bad-ass.

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• Weekend Recap 3/9/2007 – 3/11/2007
• Revised Prediction 3/2/2007 – 3/4/2007
• Weekend Recap 02/23/2007 – 02/25/2007
• Weekend Recap 3/2/2007 – 3/4/2007
• Weekend Estimates – September 7-9, 2007