By Pete Hammond HollywoodNews.com: In typical Hollywood fashion studios are using the months of March and April to unleash a slew of adult-oriented thrillers, movies that aren’t sequels, prequels, comic books or other staples of the industry’s favored summertime fare. That’s why now we are getting Unknown, The Adjustment Bureau, The Lincoln Lawyer , Limitless and the upcoming Source Code all bunched together within a few weeks and all aimed at the same audience. Late winter/Spring is prime time for this sort of film but since the slow-to-show-up older audience (who might be more intrigued by this kind of thing than your typical fanboy) takes their time in getting out to the movies, I thought it was unusual that this week we had two of these similar appeal films , Limitless and Lincoln Lawyer going head to head. Their stars , Lawyer’s Matthew McConaughey and Limitless’ Bradley Cooper are also somewhat interchangeable although Cooper , thanks to The Hangover, has more heat right now. Still both these movies might do better if they had the week to themselves. And both managed to get fairly high marks from critics with Lawyer scoring an outstanding 81`% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes and Limitless not far behind with 64%. Nevertheless Limitless, about a super pill that makes you smart, managed to slay the competition taking in an estimated $19 million for a clear number one and a nice audience satisfaction rating of B+ from Cinemascore. Perhaps the presence of co-star Robert DeNiro also helped goose that better-than-expected number even IF he wasn’t prominent on the ads. Lincoln Lawyer looks like it squeaked out the number four spot with an estimated $13.4 million just over another newbie, Paul’s $13.2 million. Lawyer also benefitted from an innovative ticket discounting scheme its distributor Lions Gate entered into with Groupon, an organization that offers all sorts of amazing offers but only if enough people sign up for them. In this case they sold 190,000 tickets for $6 that in some cases were further discounted to $1 and can be used at any point in the life of the run. Lions Gate is reimbursed for the difference by Groupon but does not count the unused (to date) tickets in their reporting. Any unused tickets (and there will probably be plenty) become [...]
