Where to find it? With franchises, naturally. Audiences are quite predictable that way.
Fantastic Beasts won the weekend easily and though it's opening wasn't really at the Harry Potter level it's got the Thanksgiving weekend coming up to make mountains of money to store in Gringotts to help fund further endless more installments. We'll never be free of Harry Potter. But, dear reader, I'm personally skipping this one. Those films just weren't my scene so unless this one also nets Oscar nominations I need a break; four years off wasn't enough! Among the other new films opening Edge of Seventeen and Bleed for This failed to excite moviegoers landing toward the bottom of the top ten. Ang Lee's soldier drama experiment Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk had a disastrous wide expansion taking in less than 1 million dollars in its first weekend...
On the less mainstream side Moonlight is practically wide now and though the per screen average has plunged (as is natural once you considerably expand) with $6 million in the bank it has to be a success considering the type of niches it occupies (arthouse/gay/urban). How high can it push that tally up? Will awards nomination arrive soon enough to keep it running for months?
And though it's only in 2 theaters, so didn't chart below, I highly recommend the new Sondheim documentary Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened. It looks at the original cast of Sondheim's flop Merrily We Roll Along and how the production effected their lives then and what became of them thereafter when they grew up. Really smart and emotional subject matter given that musical's own themes.
What did you see this weekend?
TOP WIDE
800 screens +
01 Fantastic Beasts $75 NEW
02 Doctor Strange $17.6 (cum. $181) Review
03 Trolls $17.5 (cum. $116.2) Review and NEW PODCAST
04 Arrival $11.8 (cum. $43.3) Review and Podcast
05 Almost Christmas $7 (cum. $25.4)
06 Hacksaw Ridge $6.7 (cum. $42.8) Review
07 Edge of Seventeen $4.8 NEW Review
TOP LIMITED
under 800 screens excluding previously wide releases
01 Moonlight $1.5 (cum. $6.7) 650 screens Review and Podcast
02 Loving $854K (cum. $1.7) 137 screens Review and Podcast
03 Nocturnal Animals $494K NEW 37 screens Review
04 Manchester by the Sea $241K NEW 4 screens Review, Second Take
05 The Eagle Huntress $195K (cum. $555K) 39 screens Review
06 Elle $128K (cum. $214K) 24 screens Review
07 Ae Dil Hai Mushkil $70K (cum. $4.2) 53 screens