MCN Originals Archive for March, 2013

The Weekend Report

G.I. Joe fights off The Croods, while Tyler Perry’s dragless drama is estimated right in the middle (#7) of the Perry’s 13 above-the-title releases. The Host entertains a soft opening.

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Wilmington on Movies: The Place Beyond the Pines

The Place Beyond the Pines. Nice title. Pretty good crime movie. Wish it had been better. Anyway…

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Friday Estimates

G.I. Joe conquers the top spot with similar firepower to the first film. Tyler Perry has his second-best non-Madea opening. And The Host finds an audience about 1/6 the size of opening day for the first Twilight.

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Wilmington on Movies: G. I. Joe: Retaliation

… … …

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The Gronvall Report: Down Under On Their Way Up With THE SAPPHIRES’ Blair And Mauboy

“When it came time to audition for Aussie Idol at first I didn’t want to do it. But I was really lucky that I had supportive parents and enough confidence to go ahead. I was 16 at the time. Idol has a process: you have to choose from the list of songs the show gives you to perform. I only made it to runner-up, but that opened doors to a record contract.”

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The DVD Wrapup

Killing Them Softly, Royal Affair, A Man Escaped, Monsieur Verdoux, Parental Guidance, Comedy, Dead In France and more…

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Wilmington on DVDs: Ramrod, Killing Them Softly

Andre de Toth, a second-row master of the Western (Springfield Rifle), the war movie (Play Dirty), and the film noir (Pitfall, Crime Wave), directed this interesting example of the post-Stagecoach 1940s “adult Western.”

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Wilmington on Movies: Emperor

I’m in favor of making films like this one, but I’m not in favor of making them like this—floating along in a sea of romantic clichés, interrupted by pastiches of history.

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The Weekend Report

The Croods lead at the box office, but the opening leaves questions. Olympus Has Fallen opens okay for a big action movie, but great for FilmDistrict and Spring Breakers‘ expansion to 1,104 sunscreens leads to a solid but not spectacular $4.6m at $4,190 per motel room.

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Wilmington on Movies: The Croods

It’s a millennium-old clash. Grug lies to cuddle up to a nice warm rock after an evening of watching cave drawings. But Eep believes there’s a great big wonderful non-Neanderthal world out there, and she doesn’t want to spend so much of her life huddling in the cave while the sun sets, and listening to Grug’s cautionary bed-time tales about how you should never not be afraid.

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Friday Estimates

The Croods, DreamWorks Animation’s first release under Fox, gets off to an okay start, just slightly above such animation releases as Fox’s Rio and just behind their own Megamind. Will this one find legs or will journos throw eggs? Olympus Has Fallen, in 2nd place, is easily FilmDistrict’s best opening ever. Admission didn’t get in. And Spring Breakers expands to 1,100 screens and gets almost the same per-screen results as The Master‘s expansion (though TM was on 350 fewer screens).

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Wilmington on Movies: Olympus Has Fallen

Olympus Has Fallen is a political thriller—about North Korean terrorists taking over the White House and holding the president hostage—that’s so dopey and wildly implausible and humorlesly absurd it almost leaves you feeling mugged.

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Review: Spring Breakers

I’ve been sitting on this one a bit… because it’s a hard movie to read consistently. Reducing it to Maxim: The Motion Picture is as reductive and unreasonable as suggesting that middle-aged men (the vast majority of paid film critics) are immune to the power of 94 minutes of firmly jiggling ass that can be…

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Wilmington on DVDs: Heaven’s Gate

It’s past time to resuscitate the reputation of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate. Remember how they shot it down? It was known after its release (before its release too, actually) as Cimino’s Folly, Cimino’s Trainwreck, the out-of-control, over-expensive epic that all but bankrupted United Artists and made a laughingstock out of its Oscar-winning filmmaker.

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Wilmington on DVDs: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

You read the words and they bathe you in smiles, echo in your imagination — as they probably did when J.R.R. Tolkien first conjured up, as a bedtime story, the land of Hobbits and Bag’s End and Middle-earth’s mountains and the dragons and elves and, of course, that precious ring, all in his great fantasy story, “The Hobbit, or There and Back Again”the saga with which he enraptured his home audience as he began to weave it, all those decades ago, back in the 1930s.

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The DVD Wrapup

Zero Dark Thirty, Les Miz, Hobbit, Rust Bone, Other Son, Life Of Pi, The Sessions and more…

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Wilmington on DVDs: Ministry of Fear; It’s In the Bag!;Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness

l   MINISTRY OF FEAR (Three Stars)  U.S.: Fritz Lang, 1944 (Criterion Collection) Graham Greene called them “entertainments.” That was the slightly ironic moniker he gave to those of his novels in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s (usually spy or crime thrillers) that were written with a more populist eye and intended less seriously than the…

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The Weekend Report

Oz the Great and Powerful continued to live up to its moniker with an estimated $42.2 million second weekend that handily led session titles. The frame saw two new releases open tepidly behind it. Slender thread drama The Call bowed to $17.3 million and the sleight-of-hand The Incredible Burt Wonderstone was less than magic with $10.3 million.

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Wilmington on Movies: Spring Breakers

I may have had some problems with Franco‘s Oz. (Millions didn‘t), But his Alien, a guy with metal teeth who calls his bed an art piece and plays piano and AK47s, is so damned good—a triumph of charismatic dopiness and rebel posturing—that it single-handedly hauls the movie up a star or two. But who needs stars? Who needs critics?

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Friday Estimates

Oz held pretty well, though hardly great or powerful. No matter how hard WB tried, audiences are rejecting the wizards of The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, coming in third behind Halle Berry as a 911 operator in The Call.

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MCN Originals

Leonard Klady's Friday Estimates
Friday Screens % Chg Cume
Title Gross Thtr % Chgn Cume
Venom 33 4250 NEW 33
A Star is Born 15.7 3686 NEW 15.7
Smallfoot 3.5 4131 -46% 31.3
Night School 3.5 3019 -63% 37.9
The House Wirh a Clock in its Walls 1.8 3463 -43% 49.5
A Simple Favor 1 2408 -50% 46.6
The Nun 0.75 2264 -52% 111.5
Hell Fest 0.6 2297 -70% 7.4
Crazy Rich Asians 0.6 1466 -51% 167.6
The Predator 0.25 1643 -77% 49.3
Also Debuting
The Hate U Give 0.17 36
Shine 85,600 609
Exes Baggage 75,900 62
NOTA 71,300 138
96 61,600 62
Andhadhun 55,000 54
Afsar 45,400 33
Project Gutenberg 36,000 17
Love Yatri 22,300 41
Hello, Mrs. Money 22,200 37
Studio 54 5,300 1
Loving Pablo 4,200 15
3-Day Estimates Weekend % Chg Cume
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