The usual fall doldrums have hit the Hollywood box office particularly hard this week–with Bruce Willis’s lugubrious persona a prominent victim, S. T. Karnick writes.

The animated comedy Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs led the pack in U.S. movie box office receipts during the past three days, for the second weekend in a row, earning a decent $24.6 million.

The real story, however, was the awful opening weekend for new film releases as Hollywood continued to clear out its inventory of films judged not to be appealing enough for summer or holiday release.

Despite the presence of Bruce Willis and a scifi-adventure concept reminiscent of both The Matrix and I, Robot, the new release Surrogates finished second with only $15 million, well below expectations. The film received bad reviews and low ratings from audience surveys.

Also stumbling badly in their first week of release were the musical Fame and the scifi film Pandorum.

Except for the most recent Die Hard installment, films starring Willis in the past few years have had relatively low box office appeal. Willis’s starring roles in his last few films have featured him as relatively hardboiled, grim-faced characters, a decided contrast with the wisecracking, good-natured persona that made him one of Hollywood’s biggest stars beginning in the late 1980s.

The forthcoming A Couple of Dicks, a buddy comedy directed by Kevin Smith, could help turn that around. While roles such as Hartigan in Sin City show Willis still has the screen presence to be a solid movie star, a return to what he does best would be a welcome change indeed.

–S. T. Karnick