One of the many benefits of having a couple of college-age sons who are movie buffs is that they take me only to good movies. That happened this weekend, as one of my sons took me to the new David Fincher movie, Zodiac, the movie about the taunting serial killer in the Bay Area during the 1970’s who was never caught. The movie is excellent and has opened to very good reviews.
On the other hand, Wild Hogs, one of those movies that is so ghastly that it makes you cringe while merely watching the preview, also opened this weekend to appropriately awful reviews. Joel Morgentstern, who writes good movie reviews for the Wall Street Journal, sized up Wild Hogs this way ($):

Wild horses couldn’t drag me to see “Wild Hogs” a second time, but seeing it once can be a liberating experience. Not in the same sense that its four middle-class, middle-aging buddies from suburban Cincinnati liberate themselves from work and family to recapture their youth during a road trip to California on their Harleys. The movie frees you of the belief that making it in Hollywood requires finely honed skills. If the writer and director of this coarsely honed sitcom could get hired, then the studio doors must be wide open.

So, how did these two films do at the box office in their opening weekend? Wild Hogs raked in a robust $38 million, the third-highest grossing March opening on record and the biggest start ever for a road trip comedy. On the other hand, Zodiac generated only an estimated $13.1 million, which was smallest start for one of Fincher’s films in terms of admissions.
Inasmuch as Zodiac is quite good and Wild Hogs is perfectly dreadful, how could this be?
Art DeVany explains.