Weekend box office: "The Croods" sequel in theaters, "Mank" at home.

U.S. weekend box office (though we still won't have theaters any time soon for some cities) 

 

1. The Croods: New Age $4.4 ($20.3 cum)
2. Half Brothers $720k *new*
3. Freaky $460k ($7.7 cum)
4. All My Life $350k *new*
5. The War With Grandpa $329k ($17.6 cum 

The Croods sequel is also doing well overseas as Deadline shares in a global box office report . That report also notes that Japan will soon have its highest grosser of all time since the animated film Demon Slayer the Movie is now approaching the numbers of its all time champ, Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away (having already surpassed the previous #2, Titanic)

Home Viewing? This week we rewatched The Man Who Cried (2000/2001) of all things for Murtada's Sundays with Cate podcast as well as Citizen Kane (1941) which is as marvelous as ever and finally finished The Queens Gambit (2020) which was so so satisfying. On the Rocks on Apple was a pleasant if uneventful sit. We also took in Mank  on Netflix and a preview of News of the World (in theaters at Christmas) both of which were lush and great-looking but would have been infinitely better on a big movie screen *cries* where they could totally envelop your senses and thus your mood. What did you see this week? 

The day moviegoing died?

by Nathaniel R

What is that old line. 'Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice?' Who would've expected that our particular world (i.e. moviegoing) would end due to an exceptionally incompetent cruel government's mishandling of a worldwide pandemic? There's no poetic ring to that!

Movie theaters have been closed here in NYC since late March. Moviegoing as we knew it might have died months ago while we were busy stupidly thinking of it as an induced coma that we would all purposefully awake from once treatment options improved. We were not expecting the movie studios themselves be the ones urging us to pull the plug and plan a funeral. As you probably heard today, Warner Bros, one of the last standing behemoth movie studios, has announced that they'll be premiering the entirety of their 2021 slate day and date on HBOMax and in movie theaters...

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Vintage '87 (and what would have been nominated in an expanded Best Picture list?)

The Supporting Actress Smackdown of 1987 is two weeks away so get your votes in! We've already had a lot of fun revisiting 1987 films but before we get to the main event let's get some general context of that year in showbiz history. Ready? 

Great Big Box Office Hits:
The comedy Three Men and a Baby, the erotic thriller Fatal Attraction, and the Eddie Murphy action comedy sequel Beverly Hills Cop II, and the Robin Williams vehicle Good Morning Vietnam were easily the four biggest hits of the year, box-office wise. The enduringly popular Moonstruck wasn't quite in their league in tickets sold back then but still very popular, rounding out the top five. The other top ten hits of that year were the acclaimed mobs vs feds costume drama The Untouchables, the now arguably forgotten comedies The Secret of My Success and Stakeout, and the buddy action movie Lethal Weapon (which spawned a franchise). 

The competition for #10 was down to just a $320,000 dollar difference with best-seller all-star adaptation The Witches of Eastwick just barely beating out teen favourite Dirty Dancing. But back in the 1980s adults actually went to the movies a lot rather than only obsessing over "peak TV"...

Oscar's Best Picture Nominees: Of those 11 box office smashes of '87, Oscar cherry picked Moonstruck (6 nominations) and Fatal Attraction (6 nominations) as the cream of the crop and included them in the Best Picture race (correct choices).The beloved Broadcast News (7 nominations) and the costume drama historical epic The Last Emperor (9 nominations) were also popular with Oscar voters (and ticket buyers, too, it should be noted)...

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Tenet finally opens. What did you see this week?

As expected Tenet was a major draw at the US box office for the holiday weekend, posting the best numbers of any film since the pandemic began. Still, it's obviously a far cry from what it would have made in a normal year when theaters didn't have to limit seating and there were far more of them open globally. 

US Estimates Holiday Weekend (Sept 4th-7th)
01 Tenet $20.2  (Global cumulative gross $146.2)
02 The New Mutants $3.6  (Global cum. $19.9)
03 Unhinged $2.2  (Global cum. $23.6)
04 Bill & Ted Face the Music $809k (Global cum. $2.4)
05 Spongebob: Sponge on the Move $470k  (US only cum. $3.4)
06 Personal History of David Copperfield $430k  (Global cum. $11.0)

NYC still isn't playing movies (the nearest theater playing Tenet, for example, is an hour and a half away by train) so the big new movie for us this week was I'm Thinking of Ending Things on Netflix (more on which later if we can figure out what to say about it!). What did you see this week? 

New Mutants and New Films. What did you see this past week?

Everyone is wondering when it will be safe to go back to movie theaters, or, in some markets (like here in NYC), when theaters will reopen at all? Vanity Fair sent Richard Larson to his home town of Boston for a wonderfully evocative piece about returning to the movie theater... for The New Mutants of all things. That Fox movie's long troubled voyage to cinemas has been well documented on the internet and Vulture recently tried to sum it all up, if you haven't been following along.

I was an avid reader of comic books when The New Mutants first emerged (September 1982) and I gobbled that book right up...

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