BoxOfficeFangrl

What are those wigs? Will all the top markets be in New England?

A month later and the worm has turned: Gisele has already been linked to her jiu-jitsu instructor, who's been in the picture since last year (her people insist he's just a friend, teaching the kids martial arts). Tom is allegedly not buying the friendship angle (I guess even the rich don't regularly bring along their jiu-jitsu guy for international vacations? LOL) and is said to be blindsided, wondering if that's the real reason she wanted a divorce. He's also playing much better since the split was finalized. Watch Tom go into full Revenge Mode and win another Super Bowl now... America loves a winner and hates a cheating woman (allegedly). Totally shifts the narrative around Tom and makes 80 For Brady more appealing? Or at least not as unappealing as it seemed before. It's still an extremely odd movie concept, either way. I know it's a true story, but I'm surprised it got greenlit by today's risk-adverse Hollywood.

Aren't Daniel, Emma and Rupert too young for a Cursed Child adaptation, anyway? The original actors in the play were mid-40s or so. And WB should really make something else, the appeal of The Cursed Child is in being a live magic show of sorts. The story itself is abysmal fanfic, which a movie version would make even clearer. The main Potter actors started getting big paychecks when they were too young to blow all their money on typical celebrity excesses, plus Chris Columbus made it a point to pick kids with level-headed parents (burned by his experience with Macaulay Culkin's stage dad). So, Dan and Emma are far from broke and have continued to work as adults. Rupert, too, though he seems less harsh about JKR compared to them. I think they've all wanted to do other things as actors and the validation they've gotten from non-Potter success is something that money can't buy. Emma, I'm not even sure she wants to act anymore and she's dating Philip Green's son, so plenty of money there if hers ever runs out...

I remember The Wolf of Wall Street having very divisive social media reactions (too vulgar/excessive/long and glorifying crime/bad people), but it had Leo and the premise had more appeal to general audiences. Obviously, they thought they really had something with Babylon, with the social embargo being so far out from the release date. It'll be interesting to see how Paramount pivots from here...

Movies used to have the credits at the beginning, but for the 1930s it would be 3-4 frames total, much less time consuming. I knew about the credits going into TÁR, but spoke to people who didn't and they were confused, or thought it was a projecting mistake. It's just "different" to a modern audience and not everyone embraces that. If the movie had openly stated the point it was making by putting the credits first, then critics would have called it too "on the nose". Yet if a movie isn't direct in its message(s), there's a segment of the audience that just won’t get it. I'm not even sure how much I like TÁR, but with some of the baby-brained takes out there, you'd think it was already playing on Netflix and not just to film festival crowds and arthouse fans.

When the Hallmark Channel is too woke for you... The Great American Family/Country channel has been around for a year and the ratings are anemic. Maybe they think saying the quiet part out loud will help...

Marry Me was a simultaneous day-and-date release, which never helps the box office. Kaley Cuoco made a romcom with Pete Davidson and it went to Peacock. We hardly get to tell if anyone new is a box office draw, because most of their non-tentpole movies premiere on streaming. Twenty years ago, a Kaley Cuoco gets put into the "next Julia Roberts" pipeline. She did The Wedding Ringer but that was sold as more of a Kevin Hart-Josh Gad buddy comedy. But now she's doing a limited series, because that's more reliable than going for movie stardom.

Nobody who saw the script is familiar with It's not really important, but the story they presented is just not how that works, at all. Like, a hundred people see a script when a movie gets made, yet no one thought of this?

It's a tennis movie, it needs all those people interested to pay for a ticket, instead of seeing it at a festival and not contributing to the box office.

I don't know, it's still a romcom with a fiftysomething and sixtysomething that's IMO on the low end of fine? That script needed another draft or two. Anyway, The Lost City did better not just due to the action-adventure element, but Channing Tatum bringing in a different audience than George Clooney. Part of the search for "the next Julia Roberts" was that her generation was perceived as "aging out" of the genre, back in the aughts. Romcoms were always a youngish person's game in their heyday, with a few exceptions. Ticket to Paradise is relying on an older audience (by moviegoing standards) for the most part, maybe younger than Book Club, but not that much. If Universal had wanted broader appeal than that, they needed to get someone more famous than Kaitlyn Dever as the daughter. In the nineties, you could have an unknown with a huge role in Father of the Bride, but the box office was healthier then (and it's much better movie).

And this has probably gone underreported due to who's doing the reporting about box office, for the most part... Like, when the stats showed women were more cautious to return to theaters compared to men, plenty of articles about that. The demographic info gets stated but not a lot of analysis from Deadline, Variety, etc about it. Not quite willing to doom The Fabelmans to failure just yet (it won TIFF in a fairly normal year), but do wonder how interested audiences are in these "director explores their youth" stories. Maybe it's the nosy soap opera fan in me, but I'm way more drawn to "director explores his messy love life" narratives.

It's a bit of a chicken-or-egg scenario: do the prestige releases make less because the specialty chains are gone/reduced, or have those chains remained closed because their core audience (more mature, white) has largely abandoned theatrical moviegoing? Did the $100,000-200,000 per theater average headlines fuel hype and draw more people to theaters in the following weeks? Maybe a $40-50K post-pandemic "record" PTA just doesn't move the needle the same way. And even before, some movies with huge limited openings just fizzled out in wider release. . Parasite opened on Joker's second weekend: a 131K per theater average from 3 theaters, 2 in Los Angeles. Here is where it played: Up to 6 auditoriums per day from one theater alone, including the biggest one (800-seat Cineramadome), so 4-5 shows per day, all weekend: 80-90 showtimes, possibly, plus a whole other LA theater as well, so possibly 120-130 showtimes total, from 2 theaters (even more if there were Thursday previews). It's not the Arclight never showed blockbusters, but they weren't necessarily the priority for them. For those theaters, the platform releases were the blockbusters. Now, the Arclight and Landmark are closed. In LA, The Fabelmans is showing at a couple of AMCs in the area. For Sunday, Fandango shows 10 showtimes for one theater and 8 for the other. Over a weekend, that's 54 showtimes, maybe 60 or 70 because of Thursday previews, and they squeezed in more shows Friday/Saturday. But AMC is a major chain and there's Wakanda Forever, so Fabelmans didn't get the biggest rooms, and definitely not any 800-seat auditoriums. Some prestige movies work around this in different ways: avoiding CBMs so they get more space in limited release, or eschewing the major multiplexes. But it's a vastly worse landscape for platform releases post-2020, even compared to blockbusters.

Little Children was in 2006 and made $5.46 million despite having Oscar buzz and Kate Winslet. Maybe In the Bedroom was the anomaly for Todd Field box office and TÁR is within his normal range. Gone with the Wind benefits from a number/scale of re-releases over time that modern movies don't get, due to changes with technology. People went to the movies more before television, but the US population was much smaller. There were also 40 other movies released in December 1939, yet GWTW as the one that connected the most and hung on to be enduringly popular.

Green Book also didn't have a great OW in limited release (by 2018 standards) and awards watchers said it was out of serious contention. That one got written off a dozen different times before Oscar night, hopefully The Fabelmans isn't the same sort of awards season villain. The 2018 Best Picture lineup was not some unique blemish on the Oscars, the nominees and even winners have veered from great to terrible and back since the beginning.

From what I can see on Fandango, the 4 theaters consist of 3 AMCs and Regal, three guesses what they've put in their largest auditoriums this weekend... TÁR opened against the second weekend of Smile, a hit movie and all, but much easier for The Grove, Lincoln Square, etc to give a bit more space to a prestige release in that case vs. Wakanda Forever. The Fabelmans is getting 2 screens per theater, possibly 2.5 with splits, none in the largest auditoriums or even second largest auditoriums...even with brisk sales, the real estate just isn't there this weekend. Hopefully, Universal was aware of this possibility and is playing more of a long game.

If a lot of people have Veterans Day off, wouldn't that make the pre-sales less Thursday heavy? * In non-Wakanda Forever news.... Regal: "It's not always going to be an Apple TV+ movie, we swear!"

Better than the first trailer. It's still looks to be a very conventional musician biopic, but that's actually quite popular with general audiences, as much as Film Twitter pretends Walk Hard was somehow a game changer for the genre. I think this will do very nicely as Avatar counterprogramming.

Mckenna and Kiernan and Emma Watson need to hurry up and star in something where they play the same character at different ages. Yeah, Kiernan turns 23 tomorrow. She might feel very differently about this love affair in her 30s, but she's not fresh out of high school, either. I'm not going to be like the online puriteens, going on about her cerebral cortex being underdeveloped or labeling this relationship "grooming". If she'd just gotten famous a year ago, I would still roll my eyes a bit, but wouldn't care as much. But the idea of John Mayer and "Sally Draper" is just...ugh. It was just a character and she's grown up now, but...ick. I wonder if Taylor Swift has recorded "Dear John (Taylor's Version)" yet? With the new "All Too Well", she threw in some lines about Jake's girlfriends staying young, when the original version wasn't even about that. "Dear John" already mentioned her youth to begin with, and that was a much smaller age gap. So this remix should be interesting...

I'm not one to reflexively reject relationships with huge age gaps or act like women under 25 are inherently helpless victims around men, but... "Daughters" was released when she was 4! Guess he's got to go for women too young to remember "sexual napalm" and "Dear John" being released...

A24 put so much into the poster, they had nothing left for the trailer: They had to give so much thought about slapping on a critics quote, a Snapchat filter, and Photoshopping a book shelf behind him, lol... If A24 didn't want to show his whole body in the ad campaign, they could have done an illustrated poster.

Re: Potter, maybe they could turn to animation, whether it's doing the books again but as a TV series, or making new stories with other characters. With animation, there's less pressure about filling the original actors' shoes, they can draw them to look exactly the book descriptions and the purists can have their green-eyed Harry and Hermione with frizzy hair, etc. Since it got finished, I really hope that Scooby Doo movie ends up being seen, somehow...

With the last Monday Mystery Movie in September, the listed runtime had people guessing it was Glass Onion, Smile or even Amsterdam. It ended up being The Greatest Beer Run Ever, which is shorter than the placeholder runtime that Regal used online. That was a fun night on Twitter, seeing the rolling disappointment from each time zone. It would be a nice surprise if this month's mystery movie was The Fabelmans, but another Apple TV+ movie (Spirited) would be completely unsurprising. The Fabelmans won TIFF but a little more positive WOM couldn't hurt. The prestige market is pretty brutal these days...