Weekend Estimates by Good Holds Beat Mediocre Openings Klady
As noted yesterday, there is no shame in a $16m+ opening for a big-head-poster Chloë Moretz film. This weekend’s slotting—argh, slotting!—is about the good holds of Guardians and Turtles much more than any kind of failure on the part of the incoming YA weepie. Guardians is now #1 for the summer and will be #1 for the year by sometime next Saturday. (One gets the feeling that Disney-Marvel will push hard to get to that $300m domestic landmark.)
No point in beating a dead Sin City 2. What was fresh and interesting a few years ago feels warmed over and “so what” now. When Sin City came out, the comic book movies that year were Elektra, Constantine, Fantastic Four and an underperforming Batman Begins. The movie world changed a lot when Batman became the Dark Knight and even more once Marvel found a killer app in Downey as Iron Man. The most compelling thing about going back to Sin City this year is that Mickey Rourke needed less make-up to play Marv and that Rosario Dawson can still pull off a bondage look without looking silly at 35. (I lie… mask looked a little silly.)
When The Game Stands Tall is the relative success on the board. Football and Jesus and a nice opening, in perspective.
Boyhood is holding like a champ. It’s up to $16.4 million, with $20 million now a lock. It’s behind only The Grand Budapest Hotel and Chef in the indie/arty niche that it holds in my head, just a beat ahead of A Most Wanted Man, but more likely to keep holding into the fall.
Great little number for Ira Sachs’ Love Is Strange. $28,840 per on 5 is behind about a dozen other films opening on fewer than 5 screens this year… but it does suggest that it could be Sachs’ biggest grosser, contending to knock off the star-studded Married Life, which did $1.5 million with the same distributor, Sony Classics, in 2008. There is a real chance to keep building audience for a movie that hits a certain zeitgeist that is truly of the moment, not gay or straight, but for people in their 40s and above dealing with aging family, with the gay marriage part an additional compelling element. And it doesn’t hurt to have two of our most likeable veteran actors out there in the leads.
The Trip to Italy also had a nice start. IFC is rolling out this sequel to The Trip a little bit more slowly and generating, so far, a little less money. But there is no reason to think that the sequel won’t catch up to the original.
B.O. Mojo has the domestic cume for “What If” at $2.2-million which sounds more plausible than $13.6.
Seems like two cells were duplicated; $2.2 million would be correct.
“Disney-Marvel will push hard to get to that $200m domestic landmark”
Since it’s already at 252, I assume you meant 300…?
I know it’s not considered a particularly fashionable or trendy movie, but the week-after-week holds for “Hundred-Foot Journey” have been pretty darn impressive.
Especially for a movie that most crix clobbered (or, at most, condescended to).
While a “Marigold Hotel” cume ain’t gonna happen, it should easily surpass “Million Dollar Arm”‘s $36-million domestic total.
Not that my opinion/taste matters, but I like the Hallstrom a lot more than the Madden.
P.S.= “Most Wanted Man” has been another steady-as-she-goes earner this past month.
A definite win for Roadside.
That “Frank” number isn’t boffo, but it seems like a fairly successful expansion for that weird little movie.
The stars of Are You Here should have helped it do some business, but it seems word got out that it was made by an auteur with something to say, as was Boyhood, so we, the worst generation of moviegoers in the history of the medium, made the talking raccoon number one again. Go marble!
Man…
SIN CITY 2 made as much as Robert Rodriguez’ SHORTS on opening weekend. OUCH.
Before you trash your generation too much, remember: In 1959, when The 400 Blows and Wild Strawberries were Oscar-nominated in the Original Screenplay category — Pillow Talk won. And, not incidentally, made a lot more money.
“The stars of Are You Here should have helped it do some business, but it seems word got out that it was made by an auteur with something to say, as was Boyhood, so we, the worst generation of moviegoers in the history of the medium, made the talking raccoon number one again.”
Considering that “Are You Here” would have had to garner around $1,264,285.71 per screen just to tie the talking raccoon over the weekend, my guilt for not going is somewhat assuaged.
But The 400 Blows and Wild Strawberries were nominated. I’m not saying there haven’t been bad periods before, like the early sixties and the eighties, but we’re on a different level now. Take any top 10 of any decade and compare it to the ones this century and it looks like anyone even remotely interested in anything other than their old toys coming to life are just watching TV. Then again, that medium has just been through it’s greatest period and is still good, so it’s really just the cinema screens that are filled with dreck, but it does feel bad to be so passionate about what is pretty much a dead medium
Dead in terms of cultural impact, there’s obviously still interesting stuff released, but if a tree falls and no one hears it etc
i think there’s definitely a paradigm shift, not just because of good tv right now but the ever increasing quality/convenience of the home movie experience (and ever shortening/non-existent cinema-to-dvd/streaming window) — I know i used to be much more militant making sure i saw every little thing possible on the big screen but now i’m happy to stay home and watch some stuff on my good set-up, where you can indulge your vices and slob out in the privacy of home – i must not be the only one who’s lazier and more jaded – and still have a decent, sometimes less bothersome than the cinema, film experience. (thus likely ultimately contributing to smaller films being pushed out of the cinema marketplace in a cruel twist of apathy-induced capitalist irony)
hopefully the mid-size movie can keep a foothold and even have a resurgence at the cinema, rather than be mainly the domain of blockbuster dorkfests and spectacles, which will hopefully implode a bit as costs/risk continue to skyrocket and tastes change and things go wrong and a mini-apocalypse separates the wheat from the chaff, bringing leaner film-making back into vogue. i might be a cockeyed optimist though and the mediocracy truly is nigh
A dead medium? Ha. Movies still have the most impact. It’s just a fucking fact, and Boyhood exists in this decade. Seriously. Stop being angry with things you dislike, and look closer at things before stating they suck.
I’m imagining MAGGA in the 70s railing against audiences flocking to Star Wars, Jaws, and Animal House because “they haven’t got something to say”, declaring these are dead in terms of cultural impact.
Wouldn’t you rather have the talking raccoon be #1 again, instead of the talking turtles for 3 straight weeks?
You wouldn’t be so far off, Foamy, though I love Jaws, like Star Wars a lot and don’t mind Animal House. At least they were a breath of fresh air, and I understand how, after a decade of cinematic paranoia and lack of belief in authorities, people wanted to have some fun at the movies, and wanted to be optimistic. The problem is never the paradigm shifting movie itself, it’s the movies rushing in to get a piece of the pie. The eighties were when they started saying that anything that couldn’t be summed up in one sentence wasn’t worth listening to, and there was a nice backlash with independent cinema in the early nineties, though within a decade that was neutralized by studios buying the smaller companies and the remaining small movie houses increasing budgets to the point where New Line made Lord of the Rings and somehow went bankrupt. If you honestly believe that the current practice of recycling the things kids liked in the eighties for supposed adults, rebooting every damn franchise over and over and audiences going to see big corporate brands regardless of how the actual movies are received by critics and fellow fans is something future humans will look at and not snicker at the unbelievably low standards the audience has today, I envy you. If Zodiac or There Will Be Blood or any remotely interesting thing had made a bit of impact, like Pulp Fiction or Trainspotting or whatever else that got a little bit of attention back in the nineties – even Titanic was not based on plastic toys or an existing IP – I would be happier with it, but if the role of cinema is purely to give the illustrations to media we’ve already experienced, I don’t see how we can pretend it’s got any relevance at the moment. Of course this might change soon, after all I would have said the same thing about TV in the nineties, so if I came off as grumpy it’s probably because I made another attempt to get through The Avengers and remembered that the only thing bigger than a superhero is a bunch of them teaming up.
David: Wouldn’t you agree that this is a discussion worthy of its own thread? Something on the order of “Resolved: Movies are no longer as relevant as they used to be.”
“if a tree falls and no one hears it”
…the talking raccoon will still pick it up and it will reply, “I am Groot.”
I think it’s a weird issue… and certainly not resolved, unless you’re over 40 (which I am) and not always then (not for me)…
And its Cadavra for the win!!!
Do people really concern themselves with how future generations will view their movie viewing habits? I didn’t know that was a consideration I needed to be making when approaching the ticket window.