Boxoffice.com - Tracking Movies Online

On the cusp of its Brazilian opening, A Good Day to Die Hard decided to launch an incendiary ad campaign in the metropolitan subway system. The film is promoting itself with giant sticks of dynamite tied to ticking clocks that count down until the Bruce Willis movie hits theaters. An eye-catching, faux terrorism campaign like this probably couldn't work among American audiences, but even in Rio, it's a bit of a gamble -- recently, the city has been frightened by a series of exploding manholes triggered by an unexplained buildup of gas under the ground. Over 60 manholes in Rio have burst sudden fireballs into the air, injuring dozens of Brazilian pedestrians and raising red flags about the country's ability to solve the problem before the 2014 World Cup. What happens to the explosive A Good Day to Die Hard campaign when the countdown clock hits zero? No official word yet, but the answer may be reflected in its opening weekend box office. 

The final ranking is in for last weekend's Brazilian box office and Zero Dark Thirty got some bad news. Post-Carnival crowds were in no mood to see the war thriller, which barely managed to crack the top ten. Kathryn Bigelow's Osama Bin Laden picture opened at just #8 on the charts while lingering holdovers like Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters and Silver Linings Playbook claimed the top two slots. But at least Zero Dark Thirty trumped the paraplegic romance The Sessions. Not only did the John Hawkes dramedy fail to crack the top ten, it didn't even make the top 15. Instead, it opened at #20 in Brazil, far below even Life of Pi in its ninth weekend. 

Colegas, or Buddies, has already had a good run on the festival circuit with a Best Brazilian Picture win at the Sao Paulo Film Festival. Now on the cusp of its theatrical premiere on March 1, Marcelo Galvão's comedy about three movie-obsessed kids with Downs Syndrome who are inspired by Thelma and Louise to escape their institution and go on an accidental crime spree has a new goal: Get Sean Penn to their grand opening. Like their characters, the stars themselves are fixated on Hollywood films and have launched an online campaign to capture Penn's attention. Colegas lead Ariel Goldemberg stars in a YouTube video asking Penn to attend his movie, and in the two weeks since it was uploaded, it has already racked up over 1.3 million views. Penn's camp has yet to issue an official response to the invitation, but it's one the actor should strongly consider: his last film, Gangster Squad, opened at a mere #9 on the charts with just $297K.

Watch Colegas' Sean Penn plea

The trailer for Colegas

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters looks to have made $1.6 million this weekend, enough to hold on to the top spot on the Brazilian charts for the fourth week in a row. If true, the streak has the Jeremy Renner adventure film tying another Jeremy Renner adventure film -- The Avengers -- which also dominated the charts for four weeks last spring. Of course, the competition during this early stretch of 2013 is much less intense. Compared to The Avengers' total Brazilian take of $63.9 million, Hansel and Gretel has to date made a solid, but much smaller $19.3 million -- still enough that it may manage a spot on the top 10 of 2013. The week-to-week drop is estimated at a mere 15%, a figure that likely received a boost from the Carnival holidays.

The big film on Elite Squad director Jose Padilha's radar is his reboot of RoboCop, which stars The Killing's Joel Kinnaman and Samuel L. Jackson and is scheduled for a 2014 release. But in 2010, the same year that Padilha came to global attention when Elite Squad 2 broke box office records in Brazil, the director kicked off an unusual project: a documentary on the Yanomami tribe from a wedge of the Amazon River that straddles Brazil and Venezuela. The tribe came to fame in two curious and contradictory ways: as the focus of controversial anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon's study Yanomami: The Fierce People, and as the supposed subjects in the gory 1980 horror film Cannibal Holocaust. Padilha's documentary, Secrets of the Tribe, is meant to be a more honest and longform exploration of the Yanomami culture starting with the increased attention it received after Chagnon's book was published in the '60s. Secrets of the Tribe will be released in Brazilian theaters on 2/22. 

Watch the trailer for Secrets of the Tribe.