MCN Weekend Archive for September, 2014
Friday Box Office Estimates
The Equalizer opened right in the middle between Denzel Washington’s two biggest solo-star openers, The Book of Eli and Safe House, suggesting that this could be his third $100 million movie… and if not, just short of it. Also opening, The Boxtrolls, edgy stop-motion from Laika, featuring an amazing vocal performance by Sir Ben Kingsley. The opening day is slightly better than the last Laika, Paranorman, which suggests that the trick to pushing these films over $100m domestic still has not been solved.
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It was a week of sweeping out the old and welcoming the new, starting with a trio of new national releases. Young adult adventure The Maze Runner topped the frame with an estimated $32.3 million while the competition played below expectations. Downbeat thriller A Walk Among the Tombstones bowed with $13.1 million while Shawn Levy’s R-rated dramedy of a grieving family, This is Where I Leave You, bantered to $11.7 million.
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Fox is back for another dip in the YA pond with The Maze Runner and the results are a touch better than the first Percy Jackson entry. Liam Neeson is five years into his role as the man from whom people should not be taken… and this looks to be his weakest wide opening (with one 2010 exception) since then. And ensemble comedy This Is Where I Leave You(formerly “The J Word”) is another soft opening in a year of soft openings for WB, their weakest since Transcendence. Yellow Day and Hector & The Search For Happiness will have the best per-screen among runs under 130 screens.
Read the full article »The DVD Wrapup: Think Like a Man Too, Richard Lewis, Battery, Eraserhead, Chain Saw, Spartacus, Roosevelts, POWs … More
Watching comedian Richard Lewis in Bundle of Nerves, I naturally flashed back to a night, more than 25 years ago, when I first saw him perform live. It was in an intimate room in a Chicago hotel famous for the many legendary comics and musicians who had previously stayed there and whose ghosts may still be haunting the stage and lobby. What I remember most was laughing non-stop throughout the show and, at one point, almost falling on the floor. I’d seen Lewis on the late-night talk shows and he was even funnier in person.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: The Skeleton Twins
Many American plays and movies about families are horror stories of a sort. That’s true of some of the masters of the form, like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill—and it also goes somewhat for Craig Johnson’s The Skeleton Twins, in which Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, two brilliant comic actors taking a whirl at drama, play a pair of New York-born suburban twins, Milo and Maggie, who’ve been alienated for a decade (since their mid-‘20s) and are now drawn together by what was very nearly a double tragedy: near-simultaneous near-suicides of both because of unhappy love lives.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Honeymoon
Suppose you drove off for a romantic rendezvous in your parent’s isolated cabin in the woods, and the honeymoon quickly degenerated from an idyll into something…else. Suppose you went off together to be alone and wild and erotically indulgent and your lover began behaving like someone or something….else.
Read the full article »Weekend Estimates: September 14, 2014
No Good Dead|24.4 (11,230)|NEW|24.4 Dolphin Tale 2|16.6 (4,540)|NEW|16.6 Guardians of the Galaxy|7.9 (2,550)|-23%|305.8 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles|4.8 (1,630)|-26%|181.1 The Drop|4.4 (5,480)|NEW|4.4 Let’s Be Cops|4.3 (1,570)|-22%|73 If I Stay|4.0 (1,320)|-28%|44.9 The November Man|2.8 (1,030)|-36%|22.5 The Giver|2.5 (1,120)|-26%|41.2 The Hundred-Foot Journey|2.5 (1,270)|-21%|49.4
Read the full article »The Weekend Report
It was anticipated as a close race between debuting movies No Good Deed and Dolphin Tale 2 with the former given the edge. In the end Deed exceeded expectations with an estimated debut of $24.4 million and the sea tail opening to $16.6 million in what’s being viewed as a depressed market in need of a pick me up. The crime meller The Drop opened to fair results of $4.4 million that ranked fifth overall.
Read the full article »Friday Box Office Estimates
When Sony made the decision not to screen No Good Deed for critics, it pissed off critics and didn’t bother ticket buyers one little bit. Idris Elba, staked by Thor, PacRim, and a series of Screen Gems doozies that have opened well, gets out of the box strong (like it or not). Meanwhile, Dolphin Tale 2, which is a WB output deal movie, opens about 18% behind the original, which projects to a $15.5m weekend. Meanwhile, The Guardians have hit $300 million domestic (#1 US) and is closing in on $600m worldwide (#8).
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies — Frank Miller’s Sin City: A Dame to Kill For
The first movie was better. Or it played better. Based on Miller’s “Sin City” graphic novels–which took the tricks and tropes of film noir (both the literary and cinematic varieties) to a point of stylistic near-meltdown—the movie was a shadowy, violent, blisteringly cynical comic book rock ‘n roll parody-melodrama hoot: an orgy of movie lust and celluloid violence and pulpy eloquence that was all about the crooks, thugs, lonely men, strippers, whores, men with guns or hotly-pursued dames and femme fatales who hung out at Miller’s evil Neverland.
Read the full article » 1 Comment »The DVD Wrapup: God’s Pocket, Captain America, For No Good Reason, Pumpkinhead, Fed Up, Midnight Special, Goldbergs, New Who … More
Anyone who may have wondered what was lost with the untimely death of Philip Seymour Hoffman–last February, at 46, to a drug overdose–shouldn’t have to look very far to study his impressive body of work. Once a prince of the indie realm, Hoffman more recently balanced his schedule with key supporting roles in such studio blockbusters as Mission: Impossible III and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, as well as dramatic turns on Broadway. Never someone who could be mistaken for a classic Hollywood leading man, Hoffman’s presence was felt in every scene in which he appeared.
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Consider the Universe guarded for at least one… more… week.
Read the full article »DVD Geek: All That Jazz
Not only Bob Fosse but screenwriter Robert Alan Aurthur died too young, doubly reinforcing the vivid spiritual premonition of All That Jazz, Fosse’s transfixing 1979 show business musical that blatantly anticipated his own death (eight years later) and Aurthur’s, who died before the film was finished, with Roy Scheider (who died 31 years later but still much too soon) in the autobiographical role of the stage and film director who smokes too much, ingests too much and works until he drops, creating brilliant art every step of the way.
Read the full article »The DVD Wrapup: Draft Day, Jackpot, Queen Margot, Tinto Brass, Love Streams and more
Anyone looking for the graphic 16th century violence missing from Age of Uprising can find it Cohen Media’s superb 4K restoration of Patrice Chéreau’s 159-minute version of Queen Margot. It also offers as much sex and nudity—gratuitous and otherwise—as “The Game of Thrones” and “Borgias.”
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