MCN Originals Archive for July, 2016

The Weekend Report

Jason Bourne easily led the field with an estimated $60 million debut. Also strong among national debs was the raucous comedy Bad Moms that slotted third with $23.3 million while the social media thriller Nerve opened to a more modest $8.9 million.

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Friday Box Office Estimates

The Jason Bourne Friday opening is very Bourne-like, right between the top-grossing #3 in the series ($24.7m) and the 2nd best #2 ($18.4). The audience is there… the question is how hungry America and the world is for handcrafted action filmmaking and strong silent types. Meanwhile, STX delivers its first major studio-level opening with Bad Moms grossing $2.4 million less on Friday than the nascent distributor’s best 3-day launch to date. Not doing as well is Nerve, which opened on Wednesday and hopes to crack $15m for the 5-day, unlikely to beat Bad Grandpa‘s $35.6m as Lionsgate’s top domestic grosser of the year to date.

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The DVD Wrapup: Born to Be Blue, Sing Street, Boss, Hardcore Henry, Criminal, Opry Classics, Last Diamond, Invitation, Ozland and more

This spring, jazz lovers were given the rare opportunity to sample films about two of the greatest trumpet players in American musical history. And, while neither Robert Budreau’s Born to Be Blue or Don Cheadle’s Miles Ahead would pass a lie-detector test, both are well-made testaments to the players’ unique talents and well-documented idiosyncrasies. Performances by Ethan Hawke and Don Cheadle in the lead roles are wonderful and the soundtracks do justice to the artists’ legacy. The Chet Baker we meet in Born to Be Blue has already scaled the heights of his art – largely off-screen – and is starring as himself in an unfinished biopic, presumably being made in Italy. Budreau uses black-and-white flashbacks to describe Baker’s past and color for the period following the brutal 1966 attack that seriously threatened his career and required of him that he relearn the mechanics of playing the trumpet. In this, he receives the tireless support of a composite African-American girlfriend (Carmen Ejogo), who finally must face the reality that, when forced to choose between heroin and love, an addict will always pick his love for junk.

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The Weekend Report

It was another Kirk at the can as Star Trek Beyond steered the latest Enterprise to an estimated $59.4 million. Two other new national releases duked it out for positions four and five with the slightest edge for the horror entry Lights Out with $21.2 million. The animated franchise Ice Age: Collision Course was right behind at $20.8 million.

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Friday Box Office Estimates

In the weekend of familiar franchise entries, the headline will read “Sky Still Falling,” though Star Trek: Beyond could become modestly profitable because through international, and Ice Age: Collision Course will be a significant moneymaker, the last Ice 2012) pulling in $716m from international alone. Another nearly certain cash machine is Lights Out, a James Wan special for WB that was cheap enough to produce that even with marketing and the customary large horror drop-offs, domestic theatrical can put the film in profit. Strong launch of Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie by Searchlight at $2100 per screen on 313 as well as for Don’t Think Twice, Mike Birbiglia’s follow-up to Sleepwalk with Me.

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The DVD Wrapup: A Perfect Day, Daughter of Dawn, Bridgend, Kill Zone 2, Muriel, Crimes of Passion, Bad Moon and more

I don’t know if Joseph Heller’s great wartime satire “Catch-22” was translated into Serbo-Croatian, then passed around by a future generation of filmmakers in former Yugoslavia under Tito’s nose. It seems that it was, since so much of Heller wrote about the futility of dictating the terms of waging war would be repeated in movie after movie in the wake of the thoroughly illogical Bosnian conflagration. They would include such absurdist depictions of the conflict as Danis Tanovic’s No Man’s Land, Pjer Žalica’s Fuse and Srdan Dragojevic’s Pretty Village, Pretty Flame. Fernando León de Aranoa’s Balkans-set black comedy, A Perfect Day should have been his ticket to acclaim beyond the Spanish-speaking world, but, after making the nearly year-round circuit of festivals, A Perfect Day opened in a handful of U.S. theaters to almost no business. This, despite a cast that includes Benicio del Toro, Tim Robbins, Melanie Thierry, Olga Kurylenko – all working at the top of their game

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The Weekend Report

The Secret Life of Pets remained top dog  with an estimated $50.5 million weekend gross. Nonetheless, it had stiff competition from the incoming distaff reboot of Ghostbusters that arrived alive with $46 million. The session’s other national newcomer The Infiltrator on the hunt for drug kingpin Pablo Escobar snuck into the top 10 with $5.2 million.

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Friday Box Office Estimates

Ghostbusters gets off to a decent start, but is in danger of coming in second for the weekend to the second weekend of The Secret Life of Pets, which could have a big Saturday bump. Cracking $10k per screen on the exclusive release side, Woody Allen’s Cafe Society, rightwing polemic Hillary’s America, and gay-coming-of-age Closet Monster.

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The DVD Wrapup: Everybody Wants Some!!, Allegiant, Belladonna, Van Gogh, Mecanix, Green Room, With Child, Dark Horse and more

That so many of us recognize ourselves in Linklater’s characters and depictions of the coming-of-age process – mostly told from a young white male point of view — speaks to the commonality of experience in a nation homogenized by stimuli provided by the mass media. The stoners and slackers in Austin, circa May 1976, were then and still are interchangeable with those in Madison or Spokane, while Mason’s boyhood journey resonated with anyone who grew up outside major cities at a time when divorce was commonplace and adults couldn’t be counted upon to serve as role models.

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Wilmington on DVD: Everybody Wants Some!!

Youth is wasted on the young. Maybe. But it definitely wasn‘t squandered on Richard Linklater, that wondrously humane American filmmaker (Austin, Texas-raised auteur of the “Before” Trilogy and Boyhood), who, in his best work, uses his own youth to potently amuse us and brilliantly illuminate the worlds we share.

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Review-ish: Ghostbusters (2016, non-spoiler)

Perhaps Ghostbusters won’t define your childhood. But I don’t think anyone on the team was after that. A good summer laugh at the movies? Absolutely.

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The Weekend Report

The Secret Life of Pets bow wowed to an estimated $103.1 million to easily take the weekend crown. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates opened fourth to $16.6 million.

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Fighting The isms: Episode One

We, as individuals, have to be able to be honest about where we really stand. And if we want to have real discourse, we have to be able to accept that other people simply feel differently than we might, and that our job is to bring them around, not beat them until they go silent and become an angry, silenced underground.

Obfuscating the “right” side of an argument to balance out what we see as the “wrong” side of the argument is just as much a failure of real communication.

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Friday Box Office Estimates

This weekend, it’s a shower and a grower… a massive start for Pets and what might be the beginning of a momentum hit in Mike & Dave & Anna & Aubrey. Not a lot more greatness in the Top Ten aside from Dory, although Tarzan looks like he may swing higher and longer than naysayers thought.

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The DVD Wrapup: Hank Williams, Adderall Diaries, 6, Francofonia, Mad Tiger, Suture, Blood & Black Lace and more

don’t take much stock in the complaints of mainstream critics who voiced their disapproval of Tom Hiddleston’s interpretation of Williams’ vocalizing and stage presence in Marc Abraham’s biopic I Saw the Light. The actor moved into singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell’s Nashville home for five months for a crash course in singing, guitar playing and yodeling. If Crowell felt that the Brit entertainer was ready for prime time, that’s good enough for me.

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Pride, Unprejudiced: Almost There

I’ve seen Almost There, Aaron Wickenden and Dan Rybicky’s splendid, elusive minor miracle of northwest Indiana nonfiction a few times in the past year or so, and I’m still not sure why it carries so much power. That it’s specific yet elusive, its dense range of fear and hope? There’s much to consider about outsider art, loneliness, mental illness and brightly colored graphomania in its innerworldly portrait of now-eighty-three-year-old Peter Anton, an elderly artist living in squalor in the wet, fetid basement of his parents’ house, moldering atop his art-stuffed living-dying quarters.

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Wilmington on Movies: The Purge: Election Year

Back in the 1970s, when the paradigms for shows like this were being set down — by Roger Corman and other ballsy independent producers — this kind of picture would have been a low- budget job, and it probably would have been better for it. If they were going to spend more money on The Purge: Election Year, they might at least have played around more with the idea of an entire nation plunged into chaos.

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Wilmington on Film: Our Kind of Traitor

Obviously, they both have superb literary taste, at least in their choice of projects. But Traitor isn’t the kind of success that seems within reach, that might have been. Some of the actors (like the otherwise admirable Lewis) seem younger than they should be. The hooks don’t grip us, and the ending doesn’t wipe you out the way it should. But you can’t have everything, as Perry Makepeace learns

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The Weekend Report

Finding Dory was top choice movie for the third weekend during the holiday frame with an estimated $41.8 million (all figures reflect 3-day box office). Three national newcomers followed: The Legend of Tarzan with $37.7 million, The Purge: Election Year grossing $30.8 and The BFG bowing to $19.2 million. The good news was the trio outperformed expectations. The bad newss? Expectations were low.

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Friday Box Office Estimates

Early results are in for The Purge: Election Year, though expect it to land in second, maybe even third. Finding Dory will once again float to the top of the bowl, while newcomers The Legend of Tarzan could wind up in the #2 slot (or #3) depending on what audience actually showed up for this swing. The BFG is looking at a $30m+ 4-day, but that is still disappointing versus expectations of a big-budget Spielberg movie. Disney will look for international to make the film profitable. In other news, ID4-2 gets slaughtered on its second Friday, off a stomach-twisting 72%, though this film too could be pushed into black ink by international… as long as crap word-of-mouth doesn’t catch up everywhere outside the US.

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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