Title: Rush Hour 3 (2007)
Directed By: Brett Ratner
Written By: Jeff Nathanson
Release Date: August 10, 2007
Domestic Distributor: New Line Cinema
Cast: Chris Tucker, Jackie Chan, Hiroyuki Sanada
Rated: PG-13
Genre: Thriller 

Box Office Information

• Budget: $180,000,000
• Financed by: New Line Cinema,  Arthur Sakissian, Roger Birnbaum
• Domestic Box Office Gross: $140.125.968
• International box office : $116,459,914

Official Trailer

Synopsis

Aunt Polly yells and looks for Tom Sawyer to talk to him about where the jam went.

But Tom is smarter than his aunt and gets away.

Aunt Polly, on the other hand, loves him so much that she can’t be too mean to him.

She thinks he will take the day off, and he does.

During the afternoon, Tom fights with a boy from St. Louis.

Because Tom’s clothes are so dirty after the fight, Aunt Polly takes away his freedom on Saturday and makes him whitewash the fence at home that night as a punishment.

Now if you’re wondering why this doesn’t sound familiar to you, it’s easy to explain. Back in 2007 Hollywood was into subliminal story telling. In other words, there is the surface story and then there is the subconscious story. The one that is flashed on screen for only a fraction of a second every five minutes or so. It was believed that this technique would influence the brain into thinking it had just seen a dense, highly layered, work of art. 

So what you have above is the synopsis of the subliminal storyline, which is a direct steal from Mark Twain’s ‘Tom Sawyer.’ 

There doesn’t seem to be any reason to expand on the real story of Rush Hour 3. It’s a combination buddy and cop movie. Same old car chases, explosions, and betrayal by the higher ups. You can write that kind of a script in your sleep.

So what’s wrong with this movie, huh?

Box office receipts for Rush Hour 3 were actually very respectable. And the Hollywood accountants labeled it a profitable movie. But it’s not. Besides being artistically bankrupt, the film did not make its two stars, Jackie Chan and Chris Rock, a single solitary dime.

Let’s examine this bookkeeping conundrum a little closer as a lesson in cinema history . . .

When a property is hot in Hollywood, his or her agent begins double-booking them in movies. Double-booking is an amazing mathematical function whereby the agent signs up their hot property not for just one film, but for two films, scheduled at the same time.

The theory is that one of the film projects is bound to fall through. And if it does, the hot property still has a movie to fall back on. It’s a sweet deal for the agent, who collects his fee for both movies whether they both get made or not – but a rather sour deal for the hot property in question. Because, you see, said star won’t be paid anything for a movie not made – and then on the movie that actually is made there is the little matter of withholding tax and capital gains tax. Hollywood stars have had to struggle with this since the 1930s. Most megastars got around it by forming their own production companies and amortizing their salaries as an expense that could be deducted. But in the case of Rush Hour 3, both Jackie Chan and Chris Rock (who both have their own production companies) unwisely let an outside entity handle the production in return for an eye-popping performance fee. But then the Hollywood bean counters found a way to tie up that performance fee with the net profits, not the gross profits, of the movie. 

The movie did very well for net, but when calculated for gross profits it lost money. And that meant that Chan and Rock did the movie for giggles – cuz they didn’t put anything in the bank from it.

Since that financial debacle, both Chan and Rock have insisted on their own production companies handling any movies they make. Once bitten, twice shy.

Box Office Numbers

With a production budget of some $180 million and a worldwide box office 1.4 times the production budget, Rush Hour 3 took $140,125,968 domestically and grossed $116,459,914 overseas at the box office.

Rush Hour 3 played to 3778 theaters and took $49,100,158 (35.0%of total gross) in its opening weekend.

The film played to a total of 3778 theaters domestically and took a domestic share of some 54.6%.

Having ranked number 1 in its opening weekend,Rush Hour 3 dropped to 2nd in its second weekend – running for a total of 14 weeks, with an average weekend domestic gross of $2,500 based on a 6.2 weeks average run per theater.

Rush Hour 3  was released in four languages. Cantonese, English, French and Japanese. Internationally there was a lifetime gross of $116,459,914.