Nicole Kidman didn’t have a rough weekend of DUIs and arrests, but her new movie didn’t achieve box office glory.

Nicole Kidman’s new science fiction thriller, The Invasion, has had a bad opening weekend at the North American box office.

It finished fifth, taking just $US6 million ($7.53 million).

The re-make of the 1956 horror classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers has been savaged by critics.

ABC.net.au

Why would you ever re-make Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Isn’t it considered a horror cult classic? Then again, she was also in The Stepford Wives and that was a stinker of a re-make too.

Nicole probably doesn’t care how the movie does at the box office, she already was paid $17million for her role.

The rest of the top five went as follows:
1. The Superbad $31.2mil
2. Rush Hour 3 $21.8mil
3. The Bourne Ultimatum $18.9mil
4. The Simpsons $6.7mi
5. The Invasion $6mil

If having your movie bomb isn’t bad enough, her upcoming film The Golden Compass, based on the books by Philip Pullman, has been accused of being anti-Catholic.

Kidman said some of the religious elements were removed from the movie script. “It has been watered down a little,” she told Entertainment Weekly.

“I was raised Catholic, the Catholic Church is part of my essence,” Kidman said.

“I wouldn’t be able to do this film if I thought it were at all anti-Catholic.”

In Pullman’s book, he describes an organisation that snatches children to surgically remove their souls, in a reference widely considered to be a controversial description of the Catholic Church.

In the film script, the organisation is referred to only as a fictional place known as “the Magisterium”.

The Golden Compass, which will be the first film in a fantasy trilogy starring Kidman, is not due for release in the US until December 7, but it is already prompting concern among parent groups.

“Clergymen who kidnap children. Witches who aren’t wicked. Even a pair of sexually ambiguous angels. If you thought Harry Potter was blasphemous, wait till you get a look at [this] trilogy,” wrote one film critic last week.

Sydney Morning Herald

This film doesn’t sound like a children’s film at all!

I guess the church is happy to have Nic back in the fold after her Catholic wedding to Keith Urban. I thought the Catholic Church frowned on divorce, but maybe previous marriages to Scientologists don’t count?

Picure note by Celebitchy: Header image is of Kidman at a UN Dinner in Sydney at the beginning of the month. Thanks to WENN.