The Hot Blog Archive for July, 2018

Weekend Estimates: Mission Succeeds But Doesn’t Blow Up, Titans Go Boom Boom

Weekend Estimates 2018-07-29 at 12.03.02 PM

A solid Mission: Impossible opening for Mission: Impossible.

You can’t complain about it. It’s the best in the series. But you can’t crow about it either. It’s the #7 opening of the summer (if you include Avengers, which I do).

It will gross between $195m and $210 million domestic and between $375m and $500 million internationally, a worldwide box office range of $570 million to $710 million.

Four of Cruise’s Top 5 worldwide grossers are M:I movies. This will push #5 down to #6. Could he his 3rd best ever. Could be his best. We’ll know in time and it won’t be because of domestic box office.

There is something nice about consistency. And this is one of the most consistent franchises in the world. In a way, it is a bit like Bond, pre-2012. Consistent growth for a mature franchise, not nothing shocking. Then BOOM, Skyfall almost doubles Quantum of Solace, which was the #2 all-time Bond grosser when it was released. The franchise goes from $500 million something a movie to over $1 billion. SPECTRE fell back a bit, but only to $880 million, which is still a giant leap in the franchise’s history.

I think that people expected this Mission to somehow be Skyfall. McQuarrie did a great job with the last M:I film (his first) and this was the payoff.

But… it’s not. Still right in the pocket.

I thought that Tom Cruise, while in amazing shape, looked every minute his 50seomthing years. It’s one of the things I liked about the film. But maybe we have to come to grips with movie stars, sans CG-driven ideas, being capped at $500 million international, a number Cruise has never broken.

Even Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle, which did almost a billion worldwide, was just barely past $500 million international… and aside from F&F, it was his biggest international movie by over $230 million.

I have been writing for years that the people who rage on about the CG and Franchise of it all have a flaw in their thinking… that the giant numbers are replacing “better” work, and in this case, the power of movie stars. My position is that big CG filmmaking has created a new space for the film industry and that comedies, dramas, movie stars, etc – our beloved elements of the past – are still there and thriving in many cases. They are just overshadowed by the big movies in a media culture that is primarily interested in drawing the most attention possible, not telling a well-rounded story.

The measures of the movie world have changed dramatically. Screaming into the ether about how cruel the world is that has brought unto us the billion dollar gross is just willfully missing the facts.

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Friday Estimates: Mission Teen (Not So) Impossible Go

Friday Estimates 9a 072818

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Weekend Estimates: Mamma, You’ve Been Equalized!

Weekend Estimates 2018-07-22 at 12.33.50 PM

Okay… I had fun with the title of this, but if there is anything I can emphasize first about box office, it is that there was no race this weekend between The Equalizer 2 and Mamma Mia!: Here We Go Again. Both movies opened. Both had wildly different constituencies. They took different directions over the course of the weekend and the “race” between them was coincidental, not comparative.

There are a few weekends a year when a film or a couple films are so dominant on an opening weekend that they really do crowd out other films. This is not one of those.

There have been four weekends with more than $200 million in domestic grosses amongst the top 12 films in release. That is when a film or films can crowd other films out of their position. There are occasional occurrences of films that really compete heavily with the same demos when one can “win out” over the other. But that is what distributors pay their executives not to allow to happen.

A couple brief thoughts on this specific weekend to come…

The story of the weekend at the top of the charts is that both opening sequels, Mamma Mia!: Here We Go Again and Equalizer 2, fell off the cliff on Saturday, victims, in part, of the relatively recent practice of counting Thursday shows after 7p as Friday box office.

There is not enough experiential evidence to call this a box office trend at this time… however… the other 2 openings that had a similar trajectory over their opening weekend in this opening range were Fifty Shades Freed and Ocean’s 8. It was not true of Ready Player One, Rampage, A Wrinkle In Time or Pacific Rim 2, all of which opened between $28m an $42n this year. Last summer, Girls Trip also had a similar trajectory ($31m open), though it didn’t drop as hard on that first Saturday.

So the question of whether this is a “ladies night” phenomenon has to be considered. Big Friday… high anticipation from a specific demo… never a better day than that first Friday/Thursday night. Of course, horror movies tend to take this to an even greater extreme. To some degree, this is also true of “black movies.”

Everyone is hypersensitive these days to the discussion of these demos. And we should be. They have been underserved and often mistreated forever. Still… the numbers are the numbers.

There is nothing wrong with niches, either in the work itself or the embrace of them commercially. It is a bit… maybe ironic… that the push for women and POC in mainstream studio films comes at a time when the business of so much of studios has become about serving niches, niche by niche. The intensity of the split doesn’t have to happen… but studios are not great at subtle shifts. They get very black and white (no pun intended), in great part because of the size of the dollars involved for them.

But I digress…

The answer to the weekend is that E2 dropped less than MM2 on Saturday… though again… both dropped.

A24 had a nice expansion for Eighth Grade. Blindspotting opened well on 14. Both, like Sorry To Bother You should be on more “traditional” multiplex screens. This is not a criticism of the distributors, but of the current system. Opening multiplexes up to indie product more aggressively should be coming back in style, while studio mega-movies invading indie theaters has been the trend in the last 5 years.

Bleeker Street also scored with McQueen on a single screen and IFC got Far From The Tree in gear, also on 1.

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Friday Estimates: Mamma Equalized 2

friday estimates 2018-07-21 at 12.32.03 PM copy

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Weekend Estimates: Johnson Haze

weekend estimates 2018-07-15 at 9.58.48 AM

Hotel Transylvania 3 started Friday stronger than its predecessors, but is estimated to end up between 1 & 2 for a completely expected launch. Dwayne Johnson, however, was rocked, not only missing the top slot with Skyscraper, but falling to #3 in estimates for the weekend. Eighth Grade and He Won’t Get Far On Foot launch well, each on 4 screens.

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Friday Estimates: Blob Beats Rock

friday estimates 071618

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BYOB

byobriot

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Weekend Estimates by JW2,2

Weekend Estimates 2018-07-01 at 11.38.52 AM

86 Comments »

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon