DAJK

For some reason couldn’t get into 2. Thought 1 was much better. Oh well, this looks fun as hell.

Or there’s a massive twist they want to keep under wraps.

My dad thought furiosa looked stupid and didn’t want to see it. Not a Mad Max fan, but usually will see anything with Hemsworth. I think the audience just didn’t care about it outside of the core fanbase. I’m not making excuses at all. This should have done better. WB should have taken a different approach to the marketing. But at the end of the day, Mad Max is an incredibly niche franchise outside of internet circles, and while Fury Road did well, it wasn’t a gangbusters hit, and was also almost 10 years ago. This weekend doesn’t mean the end of the box office. Not by a long shot.

Didn’t realize we were talking about Troy. Genuinely love that movie lol.

I was talking to some of the old managers I used to work with who are still at the movie theaters, and they’ve been saying that while attendance has been disappointing for this month so far, they’ve still been able to easily stay afloat. Here’s a snapshot of what my region of Canada’s looked like the past few weeks, averaging out my comps for 5-6 different theaters. Shows what movies have over/underperformed here compared to their domestic runs. IF did the equivalent of around 45M 3-day, 52M 4-day (last weekend was a long weekend in Canada). Fall Guy - 50M Apes - 30M Strangers - 7M Garfield and Furiosa are looking relatively strong around here. Garfield looks like it can get to around 30-35M weekend, Furiosa 45M. Strong for Furiosa, but looking back, Mad Max did incredible numbers in these markets (would adjust to around 70M today).

Not to be that guy, but I do feel like the ship sailed on Furiosa 4-5 years ago. Had this come out in 2018 I think it could have matched, or even exceeded Fury Road.

Garfield and Furiosa both seem to be having pretty solid Saturdays from what I’m seeing. Maybe not enough to save the box office, but definitely enough to dampen the doom and gloom a little bit.

My mom and my sister both want to see Trap, unprompted by me. They are definitely NOT “in the loop” with regards to upcoming movie releases (although my sister just started part time managing the local theater in her town). I could definitely see it becoming a breakout.

See what annoys me about this post is that there was no actual intention about talking about the Memorial Day box office, or the current box office. It was about throwing a jab at a movie you’ve been on the hate train for for a while.

IF doing very good walkups in Canada which… makes sense lol. I’ve said for a long time on here that RR is huge in BC for obvious reasons. Definitely playing like a 4-quad blockbuster here, just like Free Guy did. All my comps are at 14-15M true Friday. Canadian long weekend also contributing to the over performance.

Take it with a grain of salt because Ryan Reynolds is a national treasure in BC, but IF seems to be overperforming here. 3-3.5M equivalent Thursday at most locations I’m looking at. But it was always going to do better here than everywhere else.

Why is Tarot holding so well lol. Everyone I know who’s seen it (which is one person) hated it, and she doesn’t have high standards for horror.

Sure, but Peele’s really only stuck to horror.

I wonder if our trackers can shed some light on whether I'm just an outlier here, but at every single theater I tracked this weekend, Apes performed worse than Fall Guy did last weekend. Wonder if this is just in my small sample of theaters, or if this was a trend across Canada, that Fall Guy was stronger than Apes. Because the pattern is too consistent (Apes doing about 2/3 of Fall Guy OW).

I know it’s way too early to say this, but I’d love to see Krasinski become a new Spielberg: someone’s who’s reliably putting out solid films regardless of the genre. And this isn’t a “oh wow, DAJK is comparing JK to Spielberg”. Because I know JK only has made 3 films, but the fact that they are two wildly different genres, apparently IF is very very good, and his first film is probably the closest thing we’ve gotten to a modern horror classic in a long time.

Nope, sadly.

In non-movie news, The Last of Us is filming just up the road from me for the next few days!

Big Fish

As someone who championed The Maze Runner movies back in high school (sure, a lot of that was me blindly cheering for adaptations of a book I loved), Ball definitely elevated those movies with his eye for action and world-building. Glad to see him finding further success here. And I really hope Zelda is a hit. Would love to see him become another Kosinski (might be a weird thing to say, but hear me out): very solid director for hire with a nice action flair, but can also deliver the emotional goods when given the right material. Dare I say it, I wouldn’t even mind Ball taking over for Cameron on one of the Avatar sequels. He’s already in the club with Disney/Fox.

Have a feeling this is going to flop hard (sub 10M OW, sub 25 total). That being said I think it looks like one of the better movies this summer, and I hope it's a 100M+ hit.

Thought this was perfectly fine, if a little underwhelming. First hour I really did find myself getting bored despite a few standout scenes. Came together in the end, but isn’t something I’d particularly see myself watching many times over. 6/10

Bernard Hill passed away today, for some reason can’t embed the link. RIP https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/05/05/entertainment/bernard-hill-theoden-king-death-intl

Selling pretty well so far here, but Free Guy opened to like the equivalent of 80M here in 2021.

Florence Pugh would disagree with that. And if she can keep up the momentum, Sydney Sweeney as well. She’s been everywhere pop culture wise, all she needs is to appear in some good, hit movies. Hell, if Twisters is big this summer, and Hitman catches on, I’ll add Glenn Powell to that list. And are we forgetting Timothee Chalamet, from the biggest movie of the year? And excuse me but Zendaya was also in that AND just opened a freaking tennis movie from a not-super-general-audience-friendly director to 15M. Should I continue?

Civil War is a A24 movie, it is automatically going to be inflated on Letterboxd.