Nanny can't carry devil's handbag
<p>Los Angeles - The nanny most decidedly did not wear Prada.</p><p>The Nanny Diaries, the boss-from-hell tale that preceded The Devil Wears Prada in print but followed it to big screen, didn't come close to matching Devil's box-office might, thanks to an unfashionable $7.8 million opening weekend, per Exhibitor Relations Co. estimates.</p><center><img align="center" border="0" id="546664" md5="" sourcedescription="编辑提供的本地文件" sourcename="本地文件" src="http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/entertainment/2007-08/30/../../images/attachement/jpg/site1/20070830/0013729c050d0840b47f2d.jpg" style="WIDTH: 300px; HEIGHT: 525px" title=""/></center><center></center><p>"This is a book that took the literary world by storm, but filmdom is another story entirely," Exhibitor Relations' Jeff Bock said Sunday.</p><p>Based on the 2002 bestseller, The Nanny Diaries, starring Scarlett Johansson as the titular child-care provider, posted the second-weakest opening of any new movie bowing on more than 1,000 screens. Only Resurrecting the Champ, a drama starring Josh Hartnett as a sportswriter on a mission to save boxer Samuel L. Jackson, was more punchless, scoring $1.8 million at more than 1,600 theaters.</p><p>While Johansson trumped Hartnett, her former onscreen and offscreen costar, in the weekend box-office standings (Nanny placed sixth; Resurrecting the Champ didn't crack the top 10), there was little else to cheer.</p><p>The Devil Wears Prada, the 2006 Oscar-nominated comedy to which The Nanny Diaries was inevitably and oft-unfavorably compared, was a bona fide box-office hit, earning $27.5 million in its opening weekend and going on to gross $325.5 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo stats.</p><p>To Bock, the big-screen Prada, based on the 2003 bestseller, had a couple of key advantages over the big-screen Nanny Diaries: namely, a star named Meryl Streep and a marketing campaign that, unlike The Nanny Diaries', worked.</p><p>Bock faulted MGM and Weinstein Co. for an early Nanny Diaries trailer that sold the movie as a run-of-the-mill romantic comedy rather than a smart movie for grown-ups.</p><p>"I think they missed the boat marketing to that demographic—the more upscale market," Bock said.</p><p>And the 22-year-old Johansson arguably missed the boat on becoming a bigger star. The Nanny Diaries' subpar performance, according to Bock, "will probably prove she cannot carry a film on her own yet."</p><p>At least The Nanny Diaries has company in the misery department. The summer has been a tough one for movies fronted by females. (Note to moviegoers: Females are the ones who play the hot girlfriends and/or supportive wives.) Georgia Rule (Jane Fonda, Lindsay Lohan, Felicity Huffman), No Reservations (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Nancy Drew (Emma Roberts) were no match for the likes of Transformers. Adding insult to ignominy, aside from the indie hit Waitress, which has generated award-show talk for Keri Russell, the most notable female part of the season went to a man (John Travolta in Hairspray).</p><p>Overall, the boy-led Superbad ($18 million; $68.6 million overall) hung on to the top spot in the weekend rankings, despite or in spite of the requisite ticket-sales nosedive of nearly 50 percent.</p>