Weekend Estimates by 3-Day Klady
Nothing too surprising as the holiday weekend segues into the next holiday weekend…
The Top 10 all stayed in order from Friday. No one will do 3x Friday because of the gravity of Christmas Day on Thursday.
American Sniper did a huge $144,750 per-screen on 4 with a full release campaign and a strong push from both reviews and the military. To give perspective, WB has tried this strategy twice on Eastwood movies. The first time was Million Dollar Baby, which had 3 December weekends on 8/9 screens and never did $30k per screen. And grossed $100m domestic and won the Oscar. Gran Torino opened to $45k per-screen on 6. No Oscar, but $148 million domestic.
Anyway… what does the $114k per mean? No telling. For The Grand Budapest Hotel ($203k on 4) it meant $59 million domestic, which was a new record for Wes Anderson. For The Master ($147k on 5), it led to $16m domestic. For American Hustle ($123k on 6), it led to $150m. Best guess on Clint’s latest? $100m-plus. Same audience, for the most part, as Lone Survivor last year, which did $125m… though this one has a better chance with awards voters.
And speaking of Oscar…
I know that it’s nitpicking, but that “St. Vincent” per screen figure is way off.
According to Mojo, it’s actually $581 p/s.
As my former boss was wont to say, “Let’s see how it does on screens 5-3000.” The film’s extreme (and real-world) violence, not to mention the discomfort–at least among non-Fox viewers–of realizing we’re the bad guys in this, could take its toll down the road, though I don’t deny $100 mill-plus is possible.
Man, can anything ever top a Hobbit movie on a December weekend? Seems like nothing can come in first place in front of one. Anchorman 2 could have done it last year if not for the stupid decision to open it on a Wednesday. Just watch Hobbit win next weekend too.
I’m not sure I understand Cadavra’s point. Isn’t 100mil plus a success for a movie like AS?
Well that’s all going to change next year Big G – it will likely be MANY years before the second half of December is not dominated by a Star Wars movie OR an Avatar sequel.
I’m saying, perhaps a bit too circuitously, that despite the huge opening, SNIPER has a couple of issues that could affect it in the long term, and that $100 million is likely, but not a stone lock. And yes, nine figures would be a success for the film–in fact, for ANY film about the Iraq War. Hey, HURT LOCKER won the Best Picture Oscar and barely made it to $17 million domestic.
Isn’t it kind of ironic that the most Christian themed of movies, i.e. Exodus, is not receiving any kind of noticeable bump.
Gotta say that this and Penguins I was definitely wrong on. I didn’t expect blockbuster numbers, but I thought for sure that Exodus would have done better than Noah, and Penguins would have at least made it to the lower tier of animated numbers, maybe $125m. Big Hero 6 rose by 33% this weekend, while Penguins dropped by 6%. Hero is kicking it’s ass. DreamWorks can’t seem to catch a break these days. Their last animated movie to cross $200m was Madagascar 3 back in 2012, and this despite the well beloved Kung Fu Panda and Dragon entries. An unknown property like Big Hero 6 crossing that threshold while crushing Penguins in the process has gotta hurt.
And more players are getting to blockbuster status, with the Minions on the horizon, and another Lego movie, DW are being relegated to being in the also ran category.
Seems very risky on SPC’s part, what they’re doing with “Still Alice.” I thought it was getting a limited bow December 5, but can’t find any evidence of this actually happening since there’s no box office info. It appears the real launch won’t be until the day after Oscar nominations. I feel like Julianne Moore is getting thrown under the bus twice this year.
I don’t know why Gurus of Gold still has her in the top slot…unless SPC enclosed baggies of coke inside their screeners or something. “Wild” will be at $25 million to $0 when voting commences.
Still Alice played for one week in LA (not sure about NYC) in a smallish room at the Sundance Sunset. Perhaps not coincidentally, they played Maps to the Stars the very same week, both almost completely unadvertised and unpublicized (and, as an aside, it fell on a weekend when Hollywood was nearly inaccessible due to protests.) So no idea if it made any money, or that theater is too off-the-radar to have impacted, or if any guild members even really got to see it that way. But it did open for a week.
That said, other than the general “Moore is overdue” narrative and her typically good notices for it, doesn’t seem like a movie anyone’s in any particular hurry to see, but the studio isn’t doing it any favors. Hell, they just cut first trailer AFTER its one-week run.
In general, I think Oscar bloggers don’t quite yet to know what to make of the undeniable juggernaut of Unbroken and American Sniper the last two days, two movies they’d mostly written off.
I was going to say that Moore could wind up winning even with a small film because of the overdue factor in the way that Jessica Lange won for Blue Sky, buried in the vaults of the defunct Orion Pictures for 3 years.
But that film managed to make over 3 million, and I’m not convinced Still Alice could do that much even with 20 years of inflation.
What Moore has going for her is that no other contender seems likely: Aniston? No way in hell, a film even less people will see. Mirren? Not again and not for that film. Jones? If she was placed in the suffering wife supporting category like Jennifer Connelly maybe, but she has like zero accolades. You’re left with the other young British girls in Pike and Blunt, and the former might be too divisive. I’d love for Blunt to win the Globe and pull off some underdog win but when was the last time a leading role in a musical won an Oscar?
Jessica Lange had previously won a supporting actress AA for Tootsie
I’d hardly say that Jones has received “zero accolades” so far, Lazarus.
In fact, her performance has been (by my reckoning anyway) wildly overrated, as has Redmayne’s and the film itself.
Moore is terrific in “Alice,” but I would hardly consider her a Best Actress slam dunk. After seeing the film, I remarked that a lot of Oscar voters will probably be leery of even watching their screeners out of fear that the movie’s too much of a downer. And while unseen movies have won Best Picture because it was “the ‘right,’ i.e. politically correct, thing to do” (I bet a lot of people voted for “12 Years” last year without bothering to see it because of the same “downer” concerns), I doubt whether that sort of thinking has factored into a lot of other Oscar categories.
Everyone discounting Witherspoon because of her previous win (9 years ago) has apparently forgotten that Hillary Swank racked up two Best Actress wins in five years.
A friend in Nashville says that when she saw Into the Woods at a local multiplex, the ticket seller WARNED her that it was a musical — because ever since opening day, several people have been walking out and demanding refunds when they discovered it was a musical.
Lange won in ’94 mainly because the competition was so weak (Foster, Sarandon, Ryder and Richardson, all in not very good films).
And BIG HERO 6 wasn’t completely unknown; like GOTG, it was based on a “lesser” Marvel Comics series.
Nothing is ever “completely” unknown, but to the masses it generally was. Compare the awareness of Hero to Penguins and I’m sure you get my meaning.
GOTG benefited more directly because it was a direct tie in to the Marvel universe. Different movie, but connected to some of the same players that we are familiar with. It also happened to be a serious crowd pleaser in a summer lacking many of these, hence the outstanding result.
I think SPC is being smart with “Still Alice,” actually. The book on which it’s based is hugely popular and its fans are going to find the movie and give it time to build. No way it does under $3 million.
A valid point, Bulldog, but obviously prior awareness doesn’t always translate to the box-office, as a long trail of movies based on TV series has sadly proven. The classic example may be I SPY–Sony anticipated a $50 million weekend; it opened to 12.7 and topped out at 33.5.
If Moore doesn’t win the Globe, chris, SPC will have essentially run her Oscar chances into the ground, and I can’t imagine that will help the movie’s box office. No one goes to see losing prestige films opening the weekend after the Globes and the day after nominations are announced.
There just are no real rules to box office success. For every I Spy, there’s a Mission Impossible.
For every The Nude Bomb (1980) $14m total box office, there is Get Smart (2008) $130m.
No one knows anything. Lol.
Sometimes moviegoers can smell the stench. Most of these examples had that stay-away odor despite the finest intentions of their financiers.
People talk about Swank winning two Oscars in five years but no one ever seems to mention an even more obvious example. Jodie Foster won her second Best Actress Oscar just three years after the first.
And some actress in the 1930s won two Best Actress awards back to back!
pat: Luise Rainer died yesterday at age 104, so at least she didn’t have to see herself referred to as “some actress.” 🙂
“Some actor” named Spencer Tracy also had back to back wins in ’37 and ’38 that partially overlapped with Rainer’s. And “some other actor” named Jason Robards, Jr. had Supporting Actor wins in ’76 and ’77.
Let’s not use examples out of context: both Foster and Swank won their second Oscars for films that won Best Picture and other major awards.
Witherspoon certainly has a chance if her peers admire the physical demands of her performance in Wild, but the film itself isn’t going to be a major contender.
Yancy, I think Pat was being funny, as Rainer’s death had already been announced by the time (s)he posted.
The critical/audience rift on “Unbroken” is one of the more interesting in recent memory. There’s widespread criticism involving the derivative and sometimes plodding nature of the 2nd act (and the minimalist take on post-war reconciliation that’s a hallmark of the book), but critics seem to be bizarrely uncompromising and audiences willing to forgive.
Anecdotally the love for “Unbroken” is stunning. $150 million seems very, very doable. The Academy needs a populist hit, and has been (rightly) struggling to embrace “Gone Girl.” This is it.
“The Railway Man” is infinitely superior to “Unbroken” on pretty much every level
Et?
I didn’t really care for either of them. “Unbroken” just seems to have hit the sweet spot for audiences right now.
Unbroken would have made a terrific 8-to-10-hour HBO miniseries (Hanks/Spielberg would have crushed it). As a 2.5-hour film it just doesn’t work. We get little insight into what drives this man to want to live, and it becomes just another survival story (albeit a very pretty looking one). I thought Jolie did fine with what she had, but the script omits the entire third act of Zamperini’s life, and the one that gives the whole thing resonance, reducing it to a footnote. I don’t blame the Coens et al for focusing where they felt they needed to, but in doing so they missed the soul of the story.
I suspect Angie just got off on the torture stuff; it’s easy to forget now that back in her wild-child days, she made a habit of cutting herself. And let’s not forget the vial of blood she wore around her neck when she was with Billy Bob (he did likewise, but being nuts is part of his appeal). You may recall the joke at the time was that he broke up with her when he discovered she was wearing somebody else’s blood.
For the life of me, I cannot pick out any portion from “Unbroken” that feels like the Coen Brothers had anything to do with it. Not saying they had to blow the balloons up into funny shapes or anything, but I would have never thought them possible of such authorial anonymity.
^^^
I think the Coens were brought in due to Brad Pitt’s connection with their unmade “To The White Sea” project, which covers the same sort of WWII fight-for-survival ground that “Unbroken” also treads. I still haven’t seen the film yet, but I can’t imagine that their contributions were anything more significant than a light dialogue polish.
Haha, cadavra. I do think it’s interesting to see how strong the Jolie brand has become this year. I honestly saw her as almost a liability outside of action roles. Damn if I wasn’t really, really wrong.
Pc: True. As I watched Unbroken, I lamented that film’s non-existence. Whatever the Coens did was enough to yield a WGA co-writing credit. However, I don’t pretend to know the politics or vagaries that go into such determinations.