Patrick & Vera conjure up a big opening weekend

Don't be scared, Patrick. It's just money!

While The Conjuring 2 didn't quite equal its predecessor it came close which is saying a lot in this summer of underperforming sequels. It also helped that it's budget was only $40 million so it's already well on its way to profit. Contrast that to Warcraft's $160 million budget with a $24 million opening. Ouch. Still its foreign performance (nearing $300 million) should help it turn a profit. But one is reminded of The Golden Compass, another would be franchise that chose to end on a cliffhanger rather than telling a full story. Despite doing well overseas it never got a sequel.  Maybe let your audience decide if they like your movie before ending with "to be continued..."?

None of the new limited releases did particularly well including our beloved The Fits which earned $16K in just 4 theaters. Even Love & Friendship & The Lobster appear to have peaked last weekend but we'll see if they can hold screens or expand again next week.

Expect a ton of the current movies to lose all oxygen next weekend when probable behemoth Finding Dory swims into town.

arrows indicate gaining or losing screens

TOP TEN WIDE
🔺01 The Conjuring 2 $40.3 NEW 
🔺02 Warcraft $24.3 NEW
🔺03 Now You See Me 2 $23 NEW 
▫️04 TMNT: Out of the Shadows $14.8 (cum. $61) 
🔺05 X-Men Apocalypse $10 (cum. $136.3) )  Review, Podcast
🔻06 Me Before You $9.2 (cum. $36.8) Review
🔻07 Angry Birds $6.7 (cum. $98.1)
🔻08 Alice Through the Looking Glass $5.5 (cum. $62.4) 
🔻09 Captain America: Civil War $4.3 (cum. $396.8) Review
🔻10 The Jungle Book $2.7 (cum. $352.6)

TOP TEN LIMITED
Under 1000 screens. Excluding previously wide. 
🔺01 Love & Friendship $1.5 (cum. $9.5) Review, Podcast
▫️02 The Lobster $991K (cum. $5.1)  Reviewish, Podcast
🔺03 Maggie's Plan $690K (cum. $1.1)  Review
🔺04 Te3n $284K NEW 
🔺05 Weiner $166K (cum. $760K) Review 
🔻06 The Man Who Knew Infinity $161K (cum. $3.1) 
🔻07 The Meddler $135K (cum. $3.9) Review 
🔺08 The Wailing $133K (cum. $551K) 
🔺09 Sing Street $69K (cum. $2.9)  Review, Who's the MVP?, Podcast 
🔻10 A Bigger Splash $60K (cum. $1.8) Reviewish, Podcast
 

WHAT DID YOU SEE THIS WEEKEND? I caught Warcraft (don't judge) and The Conjuring 2 (fun scares and Patrick sings!!!!!) and the Lupita Nyong'o Tony-nominated play Eclipsed (heartwrenching). Busy weekend. 

Emmy FYC: Best Supporting Actor (Drama) - Jeremy Allen White in Shameless

Emmy nomination voting begins Monday. For the next week we'll be sharing FYCs of some kind. Here's Kieran...

William H. Macy and Joan Cusack aside, “Shameless" has been criminally overlooked by the Television Academy for six years. No nominations for Emmy Rossum (praises sung here) who has been giving the best performance of her career. Nothing for Cameron Monaghan, who has given us one of the most raw and unvarnished portrayals of queer adolescence ever seen on television. Nothing for the series itself, whose balance of drama and comedy and depiction of what American poverty really looks like remain unmatched. In an age where it seems difficult to tell stories about family without a larger, high-concept twist, “Shameless” remains overlooked and underestimated, despite its aforementioned merits.

This past season, Jeremy Allen White’s portrayal of Lip, the genius eldest son of the Gallagher clan took a huge leap forward in what had already been five years of impressive work. Even amidst somewhat ridiculous plot points (Lip’s been evicted and must serve as a bartender/rentboy at a sorority house on his college campus. What’s a young, strapping cishet male to do?!) White managed to eke out his best work on the series to date as Lip’s arc slowly revealed itself in the latter half of the season. He manages to strike the perfect balance between wry and vulnerable as the character evolves and sees his brave face and defense mechanisms crashing around him...

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Irwin Allen "Master of Disaster" Centennial

Tim here. Today we celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the birth of producer-director-writer Irwin Allen, one of the great junk-food purveyors in Hollywood cinema. It's by no means true that Allen invented the disaster movie (a genre stretching back into the 1930s), nor even the uniquely '70s-style incarnation of the form, with an impressively well-stocked larder of overtalented, underpaid stars filling out the clichéd melodramas of addiction and marital strife that tend to form the plots of these movie (Airport got there first). But it was under Allen's hand that disaster movies became the greatest, gaudiest spectacles of the decade.

Allen was not always a high-end schlockmeister. In fact, he began his career as an Oscar-winner, taking home a Best Documentary Feature award for 1953's The Sea Around Us, based on a Rachel L. Carson book. Curiously his first taste of the effects-driven spectacle that would typify his later films came in as a way of fleshing out his documentaries. One sequence of his 1956 film The Animal World, on dinosaurs, featured effects by the great Ray Harryhausen, and his very next film was his first all-star extravaganza, the cameo-packed The Story of Mankind.

More...

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Will "Loving" Help June 12th Become a Holiday?

On this day in history as it relates to the movies...

1916 Disaster epic super producer Irwin Allen is born. (More on him this afternoon)
1919 Stage legend Uta Hagen is born. Though she only ever makes three movies, she originates Tony winning roles on stage that later win Oscars for movie stars (The Country Girl and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). Also the co-author of "Respect for Acting" and a reknowned acting teacher with 70s legends Pacino & De Niro as students
1928 Oscar winning composer Richard M Sherman (of Sherman Brothers fame) is born. Jason Schwartzman plays him in Saving Mr Banks (2013) about the making of Mary Poppins (1964)
1942 Anne Frank receives a diary for her 13th birthday. She does not live much longer during the horrific events of The Holocaust but The Diary of Anne Frank becomes a key text of the 20th century. The George Stevens film adaptation (of the Pulitzer winning play of the same name by the screenwriters) released in 1959 receives 8 nominations including Best Picture and takes home three Oscars

1946 Oscar-nominated costume designer Maurizio Millenotti is born in Italy. Credits include: Otello, Hamlet (1990 version), Malèna, The Passion of the Christ and Federico Fellini's And the Ship Sails On.
1962 Three bank robbers escape from Alcatraz. The story becomes the Clint Eastwood picture Escape From Alcatraz (1979)

← 1967 The Supreme Court strikes down anti-miscenegation laws banning interracial marriage in the Loving v Virginia case. This year's Oscar hopeful Loving (2016), starring Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton tells the Loving story. There's also a movement to make June 12th, "Loving Day," an official US holiday for celebrating multiracial families. Sadly the movie isn't opening today for this anniversary so we'll have to wait months to see it. Perhaps the 50th anniversary next year, after the story is more widely known with the movie, will help add momentum. 

1985 Dave Franco is born 
1992 Housesitter with Steve Martin, Goldie Hawn and Dana Delany hits theaters 
2010 Slow burning hit "Bulletproof" peaks on the US charts nearly a year after its release. Two years later Beca deploys it to fuck up Aubrey's stale act in Pitch Perfect (2012)

Emmy FYC: Supporting Actress in a Comedy - Donna Lynne Champlin in "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend"

Emmy nomination voting begins Monday. For the next week or two we'll be sharing FYCs of some kind. Here's Dancin Dan...

Let's get one thing out of the way first: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend deserves Emmy nominations for pretty much every category in which it's eligible. Golden Globe winner Rachel Bloom gave the most fearless, consistently great performance on TV this year as Rebecca Bunch, an attorney from New York who had a nervous breakdown and moved to West Covina, CA to chase after her ex-boyfriend from summer camp (Vincent Rodriguez III, taking a bland character and shading him just enough to make him more and more worthy of Rebecca's obsession). Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna created the musical comedy that fans of the genre have been waiting for, cleverly challenging expectations at every turn while maintaining a consistent level of quality that has eluded TV's other attempts at the genre (sorry, Glee and Smash).

But if the show can only get one nomination, the one I'm hoping for most - aside from Bloom, who will get and deserve plenty of articles like this until the nominations are announced - is for Donna Lynne Champlin as Best Supporting Actress. Champlin plays Paula, the office manager Rebecca's new law firm. In the pilot episode, Paula becomes as obsessed with Rebecca as Rebecca is with Josh...

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