So anticipation about her big comeback movie, Eat, Pray, Love, was high.

But not enough, it seems, to pull in the audience.

The long-awaited film about a 40-something woman’s midlife crisis came in second to Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables in it’s opening weekend at the U.S. box office, capturing 23.7million, compared to 35million.

The film starring Roberts and Javiar Bardem, is taken from Elizabeth Gilbert’s award-winning memoir about leaving her marriage and her year travelling to India, Indonesia and Italy.

She finds herself through the eye-opening feast of sights, sounds and food that she encounters.

Robert’s real-life counterpart also met her next husband (played in the film by Bardem), wrote a second book and is now well known in Hollywood.

Perhaps Eat, Pray Love’s unexpected failure to come in at number one may be down to women’s more realistic viewpoints about how to find happiness.

They may also have heard that Gilbert funded her odyssey with a book advance and not out of her own pocketbook.

Critics were mixed in their reviews.

‘The movie left me with a feeling of being trapped with a person of privilege who won’t stop with the whine, whine, whine,’ said Rolling Stone magazine.

The Los Angeles Times saw some positives: ‘[It] is unlikely to change anybody’s life or even to provoke emotions anywhere near as intense as those experienced by its intrepid heroine.

‘Its span may be global, but its scope is modest, and it accepts a certain superficiality as the price of useful insight. Watch. Smile. Go home and dream of Brazilians in Bali.’

The Telegraph wrote: ‘Eat, Pray, Love is the story of a pilgrimage. We all, including Julia Roberts, long for a pilgrimage at some point in our lives.’

‘A minor and superficial summer diversion that offers female viewers not much more than a two-hour escape fantasy,’ said Salon.com.

Others say the film is too much of a travelogue, and doesn’t stay close enough to the book, which also touches on Gilbert’s spiritual leanings.

‘I stopped trusting the movie,’ said Slate.com’s Dana Stevens.

There were high expectations for Eat Pray Love, made for approximately $60 million, – $20million more than another recent female-oriented film, Julia&Julia.

Roberts, one of the first women to make more than $20 million at the boxoffice, is now 42.

But while she may be one of the older leading ladies, she still has a wide appeal to women of all ages,

In fact 44 percent of females watching the film in the U.S. were aged under 35.

And while critics may not be impressed, fans are happy that the film has finally arrived.

‘Everyone should go see ‘Eat Pray Love’ this weekend. Such a beautiful film….and the acting is phenomenal,’ tweeted a fan on Twitter.

Source: Daily Mail

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In Eat Pray Love Bardem plays a Brazilian importer who falls for Roberts’ character during her time in Bali.Roberts – who plays writer Elizabeth Gilbert in the movie – says: ‘He was the only one for me.

‘If he hadn’t agreed to do it I think we couldn’t have done it.

‘It’s such a vital element. Everything we’ve invested up until that point we hang on this man to bring us across the finish.’

The actress plays opposite three actors in the film, which is based on the best-selling memoir of the same name.They include James Franco, 32, Richard Jenkins, 63, and Billy Crudup, 42.But in the end Gilbert pairs off with future husband José Nunes, played by 41-year-old Bardem.

‘I had the payoff,’ says the Spaniard who recently wed actress Penelope Cruz.

Source: Monsters and Critics

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With three major, eagerly awaited new releases, business had nowhere to go but up. But “up” may not necessarily mean through the roof and toward the stars.

Sylvester Stallone‘s all-brawn-no-brain actioner The Expendables was, as expected, the no. 1 movie on Friday according to early, rough estimates found at Deadline.com. However, unless those early estimates are off — $13.5m (up from $13m*) on Friday; $34m for the weekend — The Expendables will fall several million below the $35m-$40m some had been expecting.

Starring Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem, Eat Pray Love was the no. 2 movie on Friday, with $9 (down from $9.8m) and an estimated $26.5m (down from $28.3m) for the weekend. Unlike The Expendables, Eat Pray Love will likely have a longer life at the box office and lower drop-off rates in the coming weeks. Action movies tend lose 50%-60% of their take on their second weekend, and The Expendables hasn’t exactly received stellar reviews.

At no. 3 was the Will Ferrell-Mark Wahlberg comedy The Other Guys with $5.7m (up from $5.5m) on Friday and $17.2m (up from $17m) for the weekend. That would be about half of what it made last week.

Now, the big Friday disappointment was Edgar Wright‘s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which was supposed to have lured all the geeks and nerds in the western section of the Northern Hemisphere.

Whether the geeks opted to stay home playing videogames while the nerds went looking for thrills and/or inspiration at theaters showing either The Expendables or Eat Pray Love I don’t know, but Scott Pilgrim scored an estimated $4.7m (down from $5.2m) on Friday for a possible $11m (down from $13.3m) weekend total.

If so, Scott Pilgrim will have a debut about as (un)successful as Zac Efron‘s Charlie St. Cloud.

The no. 5 movie is expected to be the Christopher Nolan-Leonardo DiCaprio thriller/sci-fier Inception, with $3.4m on Friday and $11.5m for the weekend.

* The figures found in this article were revised with later estimates also found at Deadline.com. Official studio estimates for Friday will be released Saturday morning.

Note: Those are early, rough estimates that will likely have to be modified on Saturday, when official studio estimates are released.

Source: Alt Film Guide

Although Roberts confesses to having a sweet tooth, she eventually got tired of eating pizza all day. The actress didn’t use a “spit bucket,” that age-old Hollywood trick to stay trim on set.

“That grosses me out,” Roberts told Entertainment Weekly. “If you look at any of the scenes of eating, by the end of the scene, I’m done eating. Like in the scene with the pizza, by the time the scene is over, I’ve eaten the entire piece. When we were in Naples, we started shooting at 8 in the morning, and I think by 8:45 I’d eaten 8 or 10 pieces of pizza. Pizza was what I ate all day that day.”

The actress gained between seven and ten pounds while shooting in Rome. Roberts doesn’t regret it because she feels that she stayed true to the character, Liz Gilbert, the author of the true story behind Eat Pray Love. “By the time Liz got to Italy, she was so underweight that the weight she put on really got her back to normal and then a little bit more,” explained Roberts. Neither woman gained an unhealthy amount on a Mediterranean diet, but the actress did notice the difference. “I could’ve used a bigger pair of jeans when I went off to India!”

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In the late ’80s, struggling screenwriter J.F. Lawton spent his coffee breaks at his local Hollywood Boulevard doughnut shop, talking with the hookers who worked the boulevard each night. They told him tales of neglectful childhoods, drug abuse and bizarre sexual requests — like the man who hired a pro for a threesome with him and his blowup doll.

Lawton also heard about girls swept off to temporary lives of luxury by rich clients, only to then be dumped back on the streets. One told of “tearing up” at a “Broadway-type” play; another was bewildered by the utensils at a fancy restaurant.

Little did these women know that their sad tales would become the foundation for one of the most successful romantic comedies of all time.

In the Julia Roberts-Richard Gere classic “Pretty Woman,” which was released 20 years ago today, Roberts played Vivian Ward, a streetwalker hired by corporate raider Edward Lewis (Gere) as his escort. Vivian spends a week in Lewis’ privileged existence, and they fall in love.

But the early versions of Lawton’s script, which was then called “Three Thousand,” depicted a darker life for Vivian, complete with drug problems and an ending that placed her back in her pitiful world.

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