What did you see this weekend?
Sunday, September 23, 2018 at 11:00PM by Nathaniel R
While there were solid debuts in wide and limited release friday (The House with the Clock In Its Walls, Fahrenheit 11/9, Colette, The Sisters Brothers) it was a rough weekend for wide release newbies Assassination Nation and Life Itself, neither of which managed a top ten showing. But the best news was surely the solid hold from Paul Feig's wildly entertaining comic thriller A Simple Favor. You have to see those nutsy bold performances from both Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively for yourself. I had a blast and I'm going again with another friend soon.
| Weekend Box Office Estimates (September 21st-23rd) |
|
| W I D E 800+ screens |
PLATFORM / LIMITED excluding prev. wide |
 |
 |
| 1. 🔺 THE HOUSE WITH THE CLOCK IN ITS WALLS $26.8 *NEW* |
1. THE WIFE $975K on 468 screens (cum. $4.9) Review, Poster Blurb, Glenn's Oscar |
 |
 |
| 2. A SIMPLE FAVOR $10.4 (cum. $32.5) |
2. 🔺 LIZZIE $256k on 240 screens (cum. $325k) Review |
 |
 |
| 3. THE NUN $10.2 (cum. $100) Nun Movies |
3. 🔺 COLETTE $156k on 4 screens *NEW* |
 |
 |
| 4. THE PREDATOR $8.7 (cum. $40.4) |
4. 🔺THE SISTERS BROTHERS $122k on 4 screens *NEW* Review |
 |
 |
| 5. CRAZY RICH ASIANS $6.5 (cum. $159.4) Review, Yeoh, Podcast, Best of Summer Lists |
5. JULIET, NAKED $118k on 102 screens (cum. $3.2) |
 |
 |
| 6.WHITE BOY RICK $5 (cum. $17.4) |
6. BLAZE $86k on 43 screens (cum. $451k) |
 |
 |
| 7. PEPPERMINT $3.7 (cum. $30.3) |
7. 🔺 PICK OF THE LITTER $66k on 49 screens (cum. $268k) |
 |
 |
| 8. 🔺 FAHRENHEIT 11/9 $3.1 *NEW* |
8. THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS $57k on 55 screens (cum. $12.1) Review |
 |
 |
| 9. THE MEG $2.3 (cum. $140.5) Review |
9. 🔺 SCIENCE FAIR $18k on 5 screens (cum. $41k) |
 |
 |
| 10. SEARCHING $2.1 (cum. $23.1) Review, John Cho | 10. PUZZLE $17k on 29 screens (cum. $1.9) |
| 🔺 = new or expanding theater count numbers (in millions unless otherwise noted) from box office mojo |
|
In other box office news...
...The Nun crossed the $100 million line, another win for The Conjuring universe
...and The Wife will be crossing the $5 million mark any second
...and even after losing over 500 theaters this weekend Crazy Rich Asians stays in the top five for the sixth consecutive week. That's tough to do for non-sequels that don't have years of built up audience favor. A Quiet Place is the only other original that managed that leggy trick this year. They're currently the 9th (AQP) and 11th (CRA) most popular films at the 2018 box office. All the films that bested them are spin-offs, prequels, or sequels.
WHAT DID YOU SEE THIS WEEKEND?
Reader Comments (20)
I watched and kinda loved A Simple Favor. It starts out as Gone Girl meets Bad Moms with the gloss of a trashy CW show, but somehow ends up as Clue? And also that conspiracy episode of Community where everyone double crosses each other like 5 times in a row.
A Simple Favor was fun. We liked how it was so stuffed full of plot, and just elided things you should know from movie conventions. I also admired its costumes, it’s technicolor pop, and its visual clarity.
Assassination Nation was a blast and signaled Ben Levinson as a filmmaker to look out for...yes, it's on the nose, but who cares when it's rendered so beautifully.
Happy to know that Life Itself bombed after Dan Fogelman went after the critics for trashing his film.
Only did a few re-watches this past Friday in Never Say Never Again, Octopussy, and.... my all-time favorite film in Lost in Translation.
A Simple Favor was much more fun than I thought it would be. The two leads are great ... but Henry Golding is 2 for 2 now for “pretty but bland.”
The trailer alone for Pick of the Litter already gets me misty, so I daren’t see it in the theater to spare the world from some serious ugly crying. Has anyone seen it?
I guess I'm in the minority here because I REALLY did not like "A Simple Favor" at all. I didn't think it was funny or clever.
The steady art house success of Close's movie will embolden its distributor during award season.
That shot of THE MEG pisses me off because it's not in the actual movie. At least I don't remember it in there.
Also, why didn't Michael Moore just make a movie about the Flint water crisis? A sequel to ROGER & ME of sorts would have been much more palatable than a sequel to FAHRENHEIT 9/11. And it's not like there's nothing in Flint worth making a damn movie about!
Happy to see SEARCHING has made a quiet bag of pennies. It's a great movie.
Re the Wife’s Distribution - in Australia it was released by Icon prior to the US and rather than receive a platform it went wide and has so far grossed $2million. I am
The platform release in the US may have been wise from an Oscar point of view but I do wonder whether they may have gotten more cash if they had shown a bit more faith and gone wide earlier. I am not saying it is a massive hit evan in Oz (infinity war is at $46million and crazy rich asians at $16million) but the multiples suggest it could have been a solid mid range hit.
The first 5 minutes of FAHRENHEIT 11/9 were the most horrifying this I've ever relived on screen :(
Rewatched Hany Abu-Assad's Paradise Now. I like the different points of view raised in this film about nationalism and using one's corporeality as vehicle to exact vengeful acts of reprisals. Ali Suliman and Kais Nashif's naturalistic performances work well within the dramatic narrative and Lubna Azabal is a delightful counterpoint becoming an in-between of two worlds she cannot live in fully. I am awed that she played the brave and affective Nawal Marwan in Denis Villeneuve's Incendies in 2010.
Saw Kedi via streaming and there's something about the visage of cats that relaxes me. The Turkish cats featured in this doc have very distinct cat-personalities. I was given an insight why the emotional neediness of our feline is the way it is. Like what Joni Mitchell once said: "[Cats] give a home a heartbeat."
Most of my film consumption comes from long airline flights between continents. So maybe I will be able to see Crazy Rich Asians finally.
I really enjoyed A Simple Favor and am glad you singled out Anna Kendrick as well as Blake Lively. Not that Lively isn't wonderful, but Kendrick is getting overshadowed and she has the trickier role.
I also watched the second season of American Vandal this week, and while it wasn't as good as the first, it made me laugh out loud, and that's all I can ask for.
I saw Colette. The reviews seem overblown; it’s a very standard, by-the-numbers biopic. There’s a part in the middle where it musters some energy but for the most part it felt weirdly arch and inoffensive. Which is not what you’d want out of this material.
I also saw and loved A SIMPLE FAVOR. And met you! Thanks for indulging.
Anyways, Lively has never been better and Kendrick really knocks it out of the park. The role seems tailor-made for her and it was great. I'm highly recommending the film to everyone.
Only TV. Finally caught up with Ozark. Gawd, I've missed Laura Linney. And Julia Garner is AMAZING.
And BBC's Bodyguard. With Line of Duty, The Durrells in Corfu, and now this, Keeley Hawes is impressive. Great range. And she's beautiful.
ER -- totally agree. I'm mystified why it feels so safe when Colette was anything but! Not that it's bad. It's decent but could have been great. A similar thing happens with the new bio for Mapplethorpe but in that case the film is just bad.
SAW THE WIFE I DID NOT CARE FOR THE MOVIE ( MY WIFE LIKED IT A LOT )... GLENN WAS VERY GOOD, HOWEVER./
I saw Assassination Nation and I'm not at all surprised it made no money. It is a PISSED-THE-FUCK-OFF film, and it goes out of its way to insure that everyone in the audience will be upset at some point. But I actually kinda loved it - it's kinda like Mother last year in the way that it kinda deserves every grade on the spectrum, but ends up somewhere around a B+. There is one long tracking shot of a home invasion that is one of the best things I've seen in a movie this year, and there is a trans actress playing a trans character who has her own agency and gets to be a badass. It's trashy pulp with something approaching a brain, and I thought it was pretty good overall.
I FINALLY saw The Wife yesterday, and to call the movie quotidian and mediocre is probably being too kind, but GODDAMN is Glenn Close worth the price of admission. The film couldn't possibly be more dull, but watching her is straight up THRILLING. If she wins the Oscar, it won't be for one of her lesser performances (if maybe not one of her greatest).
And then I watched How To Talk to Girls at Parties since it's on Amazon Prime, and holy WOW is that a weird movie. Kidman is great fun, though, and the costumes are to die for. I enjoyed it, even if it was not at all what I was expecting.
THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS didn't do anywhere near as well here in Australia (#9 in the box office) which is a little confusing. I saw it, and it wasn't bad. My only theory is that most of the potential audience for it went and saw the highly-hyped (and popular in Australia) JOHNNY ENGLISH STRIKES AGAIN instead (ugh).
Also saw KODACHROME (yuk), JIRGA (likely Australia's Foreign Language Oscar submission, but too badly edited and directed to be a real contender), the Korean film A TAXI DRIVER (not bad, but very jarring as it moves from light comedy to real-life war atrocity depictions) and the Italian film from early this century FACING WINDOWS (as part of a Ferzan Oztepek retrospective. Beautiful film.)
Nathaniel, thanks for your reply to my comment! I’ve seen Mapplethorpe too, and yeesh. Talk about a disconnect between style and subject. Some performances were decent but I was mostly sitting there thinking, how did they manage to make this so boring??