Ben-Who? Weekend Box Office
Sunday, August 21, 2016 at 12:11PM The name "Ben-Hur" wasn't enough of a brand on its own to lure moviegoers to theaters this weekend for the remake. My guess: Those who know of Ben-Hur love the 1959 version too much to care about a 2016 version. I have zero desire to see it so if you dared the movie theater this weekend to do so, tell me this: did any of the 1925 sensuality or the 1959 homoeroticism survive in the 2016 version. Or is this just all antiseptic generic blockbuster action mode?
Ben Hur in 1959, 2016, and 1925If you didn't see Ben-Hur, what did you see? Did you like it? More after the jump including the fate of Kubo and the Two Strings and the best thing I saw this weekend...
I finally managed to see Suicide Squad (As terrible as advertised. So sorry for giving it $8 more dollars but I had my reasons of desperately needing a two hour distraction and it being the thing starting right then at the only theater I can walk to from my apartment).
The highlight of my weekend was catching four-time Oscar nominated Sudden Fear (1952) at Film Forum. Somehow I'd never seen it and it was such a fun mix of melodrama, noir, mystery and romance. Crawford was spectacular (no surprise there) and the young Jack Palance had a kind of "Off" handsomeness as a young man that made him perfect for this shady suitor role. They were both nominated but Gloria Grahame serves it up way more potently than she did in her Oscar winning role that same year as a naughty side piece. The terrific performances and clever filmmaking (especially sound and editing) serve a plot that's hilariously rigid and then totally upheaved. I'm telling you it was so good. See it if you haven't.
TOP TEN WIDE
(800 + screens)
01 Suicide Squad $20 (cum. $261.5) Review
02 Sausage Party $16.4 (cum. $66.4) Review
03 War Dogs $15 NEW
04 Kubo and the Two Strings $12.5 NEW
05 Ben-Hur $12 NEW
06 Pete's Dragon $10.6 (cum $42.1) Review
07 Bad Moms $8.1 (cum. $85.8)
08 Jason Bourne $8 (cum. $140.9) Review
09 The Secret Life of Pets $5.4 (cum. $346.3)
10 Florence Foster Jenkins $4.3 (cum $14.4) Review
Scott Renshaw, a critic I enjoy, had this to say about the performance of family films this summer and I think it's worth sharing because solutions to this problem seem weirdly hard to come by.
TOP DOZEN LIMITED
(excluding previously wide releases)
01 Hell or High Water $2.4 (cum $3.2) 472 screens
02 Indignation $553K (cum. $2.3) 317 screens Review
03 Anthropoid $546K (cum. $2.3) 441 screens
04 Cafe Society $520K (cum $9.4) 271 screens Review
05 Don't Think Twice $400K (cum $1.7) 100 screens Review
06 Captain Fantastic $230K (cum $4.7) 153 screens Review
07 Hunt for the Wilderpeople $163K (cum $4.1) 125 screens Review
08 Equity $142K (cum. $.5) 43 screens
09 Kingslaive: Final Fantasy: XV $114K NEW 24 screens
10 AbFab: The Movie $58K (cum. $4.5) 52 screens Review
11 A Tale of Love and Darkness $36K NEW 2 screens Posterized: Natalie Portman
12 Gleason $34K (cum. $.5) 56 screens
You can feel the summer winding down, can't you? On a scale of 1-10 how excited are you for the fall film season? I'm somewhere around 9, 10, or 11.
Reader Comments (41)
I saw Hello My Name Is Doris,Max Greenfield is how as a uk resident I think all New York men look like,Nice to see Sally lead a movie,she's still a potent actress..
I saw Pete's Dragon (cute) but the real story is that the concessions employee was telling everyone checking out Pete's to see Kubo. So maybe a word-of-mouth campaign will take off.
I'll add that at my packed 10:00am Pete's Dragon showing the most enthusiasm following a trailer was for the loudest/most manic one: Storks. This meant several kids parroting the closing line of the trailer, which was something original along the lines of "that was awesome!" in an exaggerated character's voice. The response to the actual movie we were seeing was more subdued. So I think it's not simply a parenting fail happening but also the fact that a lot of kids get genuinely excited by things that seem loud/over-the-top. So Secret Life and Angry Birds make more sense than the more subdued/interesting Pete's and Kubo.
Didn't spend a dime to see Sausage Party and it was still junk.
Anjel's nephew was in American Hustle. Would any of her fans want to subject her to onset humiliation from O Russell for a second Oscar?
I saw Ghostbusters (finally), which is fun, but not Spy/Heat fun. I really enjoyed Kristen Wiig - always happy to see her on a big screen.
And I saw Captain Fantastic, which is pretty flawed but worth it for Viggo. (Barely a spoiler, but) I was glad they got him out of the beard close to the end. When people pay to see Viggo, it doesn't seem right to hide the chin dimple.
Mike -- so true (the chin dimple)
Sudden Fear is so much outlandish fun with Crawford really emoting, emoting, EMOTING all over the place!!
Gloria Grahame's Oscar nomination for that nothing part in Bad & Beautiful makes no sense when this far superior performance and role were right there to pick, though the Oscar regardless still should have gone to Jean Hagen and that win cost Grahame a much more deserved nomination and should have been win the next year in The Big Heat.
I'm so jealous you got to see it on a big screen.
I saw the early Bette Davis film "Housewife" which was her follow up to Of Human Bondage. It was so much studio assembly line fodder wasting not just Bette but Ann Dvorak, no wonder Davis went on strike soon after if this was the sort of trash she was being forced into,
I also saw Lay the Favorite, I was inspired by the earlier in the week Stephen Frears post. It was absolutely dreadful!!
I washed away the bad taste that left with two older films that were new to me. The political drama "A Fever in the Blood" with Don Ameche and Angie Dickinson which was pretty good but would have been better if the lead hadn't been played by Efrem Zimbalist Jr.
Then the lurid overbaked wonderfully lush and overproduced amnesia mystery "The Third Day" with George Peppard, Elizabeth Ashley, Roddy McDowell and a positively unhinged Arte Johnson!! A little overlong but fun.
I have zero interest in the new Ben-Hur. STOP remaking classics if you don't have anything new to add to them! I can't imagine even bothering with this on DVD it looks like a video game.
A friend and I did a double feature of Don't Think Twice and Captain Fantastic. I loved the first and I thought it was keenly observed, hilarious and touching. I was surprised by how much I liked it. Gillian Jacobs should be considered for lead actress (or would it be supporting since it's an ensemble?) I was disappointed though by Captain Fantastic which wore out its welcome. It doesn't quite know where to take the story ultimately. I thought it would end five times before it actually did. Viggo Mortensen was great, Frank Langella and Ann Dowd were wasted, and the kids--except for the second son--were good.
I saw "Dead and Buried" (1981) on blu ray an interesting horror film with some still effective Stan Wiston effects. I've seem the 1925 "Ben Hur" which is a lot of fun and has the beautiful Ramon Navarro ( his life story would make an interesting if tragic bio-pic) and of course 1959's with it's homoerotic subtext and MGM 's glorious production.
I saw SUDDEN FEAR at Film Forum too! Saw it Thursday and had an absolute blast - the audience was really into it too, which helped the whole experience. Biggest laugh: When Joan takes out the (beautifully) handwritten schedule for her evening of espionage. So perfectly ridiculous.
I also saw Café Society which was fun but definitely minor Allen. The perfect casting helped the film immensely. I also saw Suicide Squad yesterday and it wasn't so much awful as it was not really very good at all. Everything felt underdeveloped and just out of alignment somehow. I couldn't even get on the Margot Robbie train because she was barely given enough to do other than stand around and look hot and toss off a few non sequiturs - which she did with great relish, but I don't know. Nothing about the whole film was enough for me.
Seeing Florence Foster Jenkins in about an hour and I have high hopes for fun, if not necessarily for the overall quality of the film.
Nat, the 120 performances Video you shared inspired me to return to the Oscar films of the last few years I hadn't seen:
*The Wolf of Wall Street
- enjoyable and messy.
- felt like a 3-hour long Woody Allen film that wasn't penned by Woody.
- The more Scorsese films I watch the more I feel like he's not as dedicated to character development as he should be.
- Leo is both brilliant and rather boring, as usual. The character is very one-note.
*12 Years a Slave
- wept like a motherless whore
- the story is just too moving
- I have mixed feelings about Lupita winning the Oscar. She is brilliant but had 2 scenes where she was given the chance to speak and tell us something about herself, and all she said was she wanted to die. Considering that Julia Roberts wasn't supporting in August: Osage County, Sally Hawkins should have won Supporting Actress in 2013. Ginger is neither a co-lead nor a cameo, and she has three dimensions.
*Her
- the best of the bunch this weekend
- breathtaking in every single way
- I'm following Ray Kurzweil's predictions on the Singularity so the moment Samantha revealed that she could digest books in less than a second I knew it would evolve into, sort of, what eventually happened.
*Just Go With It (my Suicide Squad of this weekend)
- watched it for Nicole Kidman, duh! Don't judge :P
Sudden Fear was my introduction to Joan Crawford... loved it
Through the years I have seen most of her 40's and 50' movies..
Have read a couple of her biographies... she was some piece of work!!
Joel6 - I was also inspired by FE's Stephen Frears post and added all the Frears films I haven't seen to my Netflix queue - including Lay the Favourite! I haven't watched it yet, now I'm conflicted :).
I watched Leprechaun... Pre friends Jennifer Aniston. Anyone else ever in the mood to watch something you know is going to be awful (but kind of fun).
So Suicide Squad is terrible but is it the huge financial flop I keep reading it is? Third week on top in the US?
The Dressmaker finally arrived on UK television - a future cult classic if ever I've seen one...
I also watched, for the first time (!!!), Gilda - god, Rita Hayworth was treated badly by Oscar, wasn't she? What a star...
My brother and I played 'Spot the Jesus' during the Ben Hur trailer. Sadly only saw him twice in the European version. As for the film itself, it didn't look very good or interesting so I'll pass.
The film was Star Trek Beyond, which I saw for the second time. Probably the best Trek film in twenty years, and pretty approachable as far as Star Trek goes. Sad to see the box office retuns being so low, I'd love for the creative team behind this one to have another go at it.
I saw Kubo and was left wondering why his mom looked like Cher. Very odd.
I also saw Little Men which was charming. I love Sachs's work.
There's a beautiful justice that Kubo earned more than goddamn benhur in their opening week.
Director William Wyler told Stephen Boyd to play Messalah as if he were in love with Ben-Hur, but didn't let Heston in on the homosexual innuendo. Heston would have never accepted it!
Nat: Not all of those were epic parental fails. If "Parents", nebulously, had NO aesthetic standards, The Angry Birds Movie would have opened around $60-70 million. The other three are, but less than $40 million for Angry Birds. Failure, but not epically so.
I saw Badlands screen in 35mm. I watched Amour, Citizen Ruth, and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore on DVD. Now I'm on my way to see All About Eve on 35mm as a part of a summer long Bette & Joan retrospective at the art museum here in Portland, concluding next weekend with Baby Jane.
I had a busy weekend, but I'll rank what I saw:
1. Indignation
2. Kubo
3. Star Trek Beyond
4. Equity
5. Anthropoid
I just finished bingeing both Seasons 3 and 4 of Orange Is the New Black. I'm floored.
Salon had an excellent article about Ben Hur, and how the current film completely ignores the gay subtext of the 1959 version:
The straight-washing of “Ben-Hur”: Remake of the ’59 epic drops gay subtext — and beefs up religious themes - http://www.salon.com/2016/08/21/the-straight-washing-of-ben-hur-remake-of-the-59-epic-drops-gay-subtext-and-beefs-up-religious-themes/
http://www.salon.com/2016/08/21/the-straight-washing-of-ben-hur-remake-of-the-59-epic-drops-gay-subtext-and-beefs-up-religious-themes/
I saw War Dogs. I liked it. If you think you might like a movie based on a Rolling Stone article about two guys in their 20s gun running for the US military, then you will probably like it. If that doesn't sound like your thing, then it probably isn't.
Paul you're emotionally drained. Wish I could hug you.
I saw Hold Back The Dawn. I don't know how it got 6 Oscar nominations. Charles Boyer is the same ... you know ... French. De Havilegend is wasted. And Paulette Goddard! Such drippy parts.
And it must have been a Joan Crawford weekend because I saw Sudden Fear (at home though). It's so ridiculous you cannot help but love it.
I saw Star Trek Beyond. What a freakin' mess. There were fight scenes where you couldn't tell what was even going on. So bad. And what a horrible waste of Idris Elba.
Lastly, re-watched Prick Up Your Ears. Gary Oldman and Alfred Molina ... really nice performances. And a great script from Alan Bennett.
I saw Hell Or High Water. While I found director David Mackenzie's Starred Up to be superior, he still directed this one masterfully. To me, the standouts were Ben Foster, Chris Pine, and Gil Birmingham. Jeff Bridges was also good but the role he played wasn't a huge stretch for him.
I was at Wolf Trap in Virginia tonight singing backup for Kristin Chenoweth. Does that count? [hashtag: humble brag]
"Kubo" was gorgeous, and it feels like Laika took note of all those Disney stories about single parent families and decided to call their bluff. That said, the movie is slooow to start and I could easily see younger children being frustrated or confused. Amazing on a craft level, but I think Laika knows they're not making populist hits.
Lo and Behold - the Herzog documentary on the Internet. Fascinating for nerds and philosophers. He taps into what is good and bad about man / machine evolution.
Florence Foster Jenkins - hysterical! I really think it's a great film and highly recommend it. Cast is uniformly great and it reminded me of old Hollywood in its best form.
Hey, I saw Ben-Hur, although granted it was just that we didn't want to see the other movies at our local theatre.
It was fragmentary, bits strung together, as though the script was written from reading a synopsis of the 1959 film, not from seeing the movie or reading the book. All they got was, there's two guys and a chariot race.
The book is such a grandiose tale of unabashed melodrama and manipulation, so how did this movie get so small? The lead characters have the stature of junior high school sports rivals. The two guys have no chemistry with each other, and Ben Hur is an unlikable asshole. By the chariot race, I wanted both of them to die, and the horses to live.
The religious themes in this are negligible and Jesus is in it for about 4 minutes. He is the most likeable character though.
"Indignation," one of my favorites of the year so far. If there was justice, Sarah Gadon and Linda Emond would receive Best Supporting Actress nominations.
As someone said, if you've ever loved a furry creature, Pete's Dragon is for you. I cried throughout the whole movie, and it's one of my favorites of the year so far. Just beautifully made and affecting. Very reminiscent of the Spielberg/Henson films of my youth.
Meryl was great in Florence Foster Jenkins - I can't imagine anyone else playing that part - and the two leading men were very good, but the film is a bit disturbing. Is the theme of the movie that we're just supposed to let rich people live with their delusions?
I saw Florence Foster Jenkins and Loved It! The kind of movie that's very easy to underrate, but every element is wonderful and they all fit together perfectly. While Streep is as good as ever, (but not really extraordinary) my MVPs are Hugh Grant and Simon Helberg, both deserving of awards recognition.
I saw Now, Voyager on TCM and was even better than I had remembered. The plotline alone is unique and I really like how Chalotte Vale (Bette Davis's character) uses her new-found beauty not just to catch a man (which she only sort of does) but goes and helps a girl in the same situation she was in.
As for Sudden Fear, who can resist Joan Crawford's (literal) hair-tearing scene when she hears the recording of the plot to kill her and the record gets stuck!
"The Little Foxes" on TCM. Watching Bette Davis in that movie is a master class in acting.
MMinDC
Saw Jason Bourne which was...fine. It's disappointing that those movies have become so formulaic considering how interesting the first one was. But still, this one was tense and suspenseful, although Damon has become a really hit-and-miss actor for me. Sometimes he's great, sometimes' he's just not.
But geez, Hollywood has totally misused Damon's talents. For some reason, they take a man with natural charisma, a mega-watt smile and jocular affability and often try to shoe-horn him into these quiet, introverted types. At least the first Bourne had that romance with Potente. Now they've reduced him to a brooding, sexless bore.
Also saw Sausage Party - exactly what you would expect. Some good bits and some odd choices. Glad to see the male writers are so eager to prove they're not homophobic but disappointing that they can still only come up with two female characters in a giant world of endless possibilities and those two women are of course sexualized. I mean, they created dozens and dozens of food characters and only 2 of them are women? How juvenile.
This weekend was:
Star Trek, which was better than the last one.
Barbarella - Summer outdoor cinema. So campy, love me some Jane Fonda
Phantom Boy - Not exceptional, but a great change of pace from CGI overload
Suzanne, I don't think Florence Foster Jenkins is recommending anything. It just attempts to depict (in a very funny way) how this wealthy woman who could not sing ended up becoming famous in the 1940's and beyond, despite her lack of talent. I do hope that Stephen Frears is not overlooked for awards consideration because he does a great job with this film.
@MM in DC ... why are we not going to the movie together? I'm in DC too!
LOL @CharlieG I'm always up for going to a movie! memartin68@gmail.com