The Weekend Report

Po was on the go as Kung Fu Panda 3 led session moviegoing with an estimated $40.6 million debut. Three other national openers struggled to get a marketplace hold. The true life heroism of The Finest Hours slotted fourth with $10.2 million while spoofy Fifty Shades of Black entered the scene with $5.9 million. Belated, entangled western Jane Got a Gun barely registered with $790,000.

Friday Box Office Estimates

Easily the softest launch for a Kung Fu Panda movie… but also the first non-summer release in the series and the first encumbered by a lot of TV/streaming programming around the characters. Po will not save DWA… nor will he sink it. (And $600m overseas – which is possible – could make it a big round hit, regardless of the U.S.) The Finest Hours is the second reminder (after 13 Hours) that the January Warrior niche is not a lock at the box office. That audience is there, waiting… but like the faith audience, you need to hit them just right. And no one was much interested in Fifty Shades of Black… a parody of a parody. This is the softest open for a Wayans (any Wayans) movie in a long time.

The DVD Wrapup: Burnt, Assassin, New Girlfriend, Patels, Mr. Robot and more

As mouth-watering as Burnt is, I would discourage anyone from assuming that all foodie movies taste the same. The cranky-perfectionist conceit works better in Daniel Cohen’s Le Chef, Jon Favreau’s Chef, Lasse Hallström’s The Hundred-Foot Journey, Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci’s Big Night and Brittany Murphy’s largely undiscovered gem, The Ramen Girl. Also tempting are Mostly Martha and its Hollywood remake No Reservations, Woman on Top. Tampopo, Ratatouille, Julie and Julia and, of course, Babette’s Feast and Like Water for Chocolate.

The Weekend Report

Crippling snow knocked out large parts of the nation’s Northeast Saturday, allowing The Revenant to dredge into first place with an estimated $16.8 million. The session featured three new national releases with Dirty Grandpa the marginal leader in fourth position with $11.6 million. Right behind were chiller The Boy with $11 million and the post-apocalyptic The 5th Wave grossing $10.4 million.

Friday Box Office Estimates

Blizzards and travel bans along the East coast may well be responsible for 20% – 30% lower overall box office this weekend. But there is no mistaking the weak weekend for what it is. Under the circumstances, The Revenant is holding well. Dirty Grandpa could have managed $15m or more, though the question now is whether audiences like the thing (critics don’t). STX would have had its biggest opening with The Boy… but now has to wonder whether they can postpone the launch in the snowed-in areas next weekend and make it up.

The DVD Wrapup: Straight Outta Compton, Diary of a Teenage Girl, Howl, I Am Thor and more

As difficult as it might be for fans of Straight Outta Compton to believe that it was nearly shut out of Oscar competition, it’s just that hard for me be to believe that enough voters in any category actually watched enough of the movie to endorse it. Unlike The Help and 12 Years a Slave, the story behind the rise and fall of the genre-shattering hip-hop group, N.W.A., had several things working against it from the get-go. Not all of them can be attributed to racial insensitivity and the lack of diversity in the academy, although they can’t be discounted out of hand. For example, I can’t imagine any voter over, say, 40, rewarding a movie whose acoustics required them to keep a tight grip on the remote control every time the explosive musical soundtrack kicked in on their state-of-the-art Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo or DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 system.

The Weekend Report

The debut of Ride Along 2 shifted into top gear and was ahead of the pack with an estimated $34 million (all figures reflect 3-day portion of weekend). Two other films bowed nationally for the Martin Luther King holiday frame. The torn-from- headlines 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi slotted fourth with $15.7 million while the low-budget animated Norm of the North opened to $6.6 million. Exclusive bows were largely dull, save for The Lady in the Van, which parked $68,400 in four driveways

Friday Box Office Estimates

The Revenant sticks the landing, as it builds on its strong opening with an excellent hold, guided by its Oscar nomination success. The Big Short is the only other Best Picture nominee in the Top 10, looking to hit $50 million by the end of the weekend. Meanwhile, Ride Along 2 returns to about 16% less than the original did twp years ago in the same slot. Michael Bay’s Benghazi testosterone ride opens pretty well, though not quite as explosively as some thought it might, running at about half the speed of Lone Survivor, which set the standard (after 2002’s Black Hawk Down). Barely on the radar, Norm of the North.

The DVD Wrapup: The Walk, Irrational Man, Look of Silence, Bitter Rice, Last Horror Film and more

Absent any physical evidence of the edifice’s longtime mastery of the city’s skyline, Petit’s feat might just as well have been a scene from a movie.

The Weekend Report

Star Wars: The Force Awakens manages/estimates a 3.9x Friday weekend to push past The Revenant‘s 2.6x Friday 3-day result. Also showing strong Saturday upticks, Daddy’s Home (3.6x Friday) and Sisters (3.2x Friday).

Friday Box Office Estimates

The Revenant arrives with a bear of an opening, thrashing Star Wars to within an inch of its $800-million-at-the-end-of-the-weekend life. The Forest arrives to a mixed number… not a bomb by the standard of the genre in January, but not a hit either. The other holdovers get hit hard by “not a holiday anymore” disease.

The DVD Wrapup: Sicario, Sleeping With Other People, Maneater, Cruel, Broad City and more

Stripped to its narrative framework, Sicario is a powerfully rendered procedural that, while chronicling a strike against a cartel kingpin, forces viewers to endorse or decry the extralegal tactics used in the elimination of so-called narco-terrorists. In the same way that Osama Bin Laden was denied the luxury of a trial by a Navy SEAL hit squad, the target of the CIA-led commando unit in Sicario isn’t likely to require the services of a lawyer, either. Do we care? No more than we sweated the details of the raid on Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. Villeneuve reserves those questions for Blunt’s ethically grounded FBI agent.

The Weekend Report

Domestic box office for 2015 set a new record of $11.2 billion, a 7.3% revenue bump from 2014. Star Wars: The Force Awakens remained the top title in the universe with an estimated $88.8 million. There were no new national releases but The Hateful Eight expanded and shot up third with $16 million.

Friday Box Office Estimates

Star Wars: The Force Awakens continues to dominate the known universe, likely to announce a Sunday estimate topping Avatar‘s record domestic gross. The film will pass $700 million today, 16 days into its run, while Avatar hit the mark on its 72nd day of release.But Avatar maintains a $1.3 billion lead in international theatrical.

Daddy’s Home will pass the $90m mark that Get Hard achieved this last spring, marking Will Ferrell’s third $90m+ domestic hit in the last two years. The Hateful 8 expanded earlier than expected, delivering a solid $7,500 or so per-screen for the weekend, but significantly behind the opening of Django Unchained in 2012.