Box Office: Split Dominates, Hidden Figures Stays Strong

The big winner at hte box office this weekend was M Night Shyamalan's split personality thriller Split starring James McAvoy, Betty Buckley (!!!) and The Witch's Anya-Taylor Joy. Hidden Figures continued to show signs of a hefty box office tally to come with another very low percentage drop and Sing has become the biggest grossing movie of all time that never hit #1 at the box office, surpassing the previous record holder My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Martin Scorsese's Silence has gone wide but is still struggling to find takers and The Founder, after a long delayed release, opened as well to $3+ million. Meanwhile 20th Century Women added 600+ theaters and is finally ready for your eyeballs and you MUST see it. It's marvelous. Silence added over 800 screens but to little traction from moviegoers. 

TOP WIDE
(over 800 screens)
01 Split $40.1 NEW 
02 xXx: Return of Xander Cage $20 NEW 
03 Hidden Figures $16.2 (cum. $84.2) Podcast
04 Sing $9 (cum. $249.3) 
05 La La Land $8.3 (cum. $89.6) Reviewish, Demy Influence, and How Rare It Is!

TOP LIMITED
(under 800 screens - excluding previously wide)
01 Lion $1.8 (cum. $16.3) 575 screens Review and Nicole
02 20th Century Women $1.4 (cum. $2.3) 650 screens  Podcast, Top Ten, Billy Crudup, First Impressions
03 Moonlight $633K (cum. $15.8) 489 screens Review,Podcast, and Supporting
04 Jackie $365K (cum. $11.2) 239 screens Review and Interview
05 Paterson  $123K (cum. $529K) 38 screens Review

 What did you see this weekend? 

Can "Hidden Figures" and "La La Land" get other films greenlit?

If you believe that success for one movie inspires greenlit for similar movies, than now is the time for filmmakers to pitch movies with black female leads and new movie musicals! Both Hidden Figures and La La Land are shaping up to be giant hits. And that's before Oscar nominations give them another boost. Hidden Figures fell only 10% in its second wide weekend which is non-existent as drops go, indicating amazing word of mouth and potentially very long legs with audiences. Meanwhile La La Land should be at $100 million in no time. Question: how many musical hits do there need to be exactly before Hollywood gets that people like them? Chicago, Dreamgirls, Hairspray, Les Miz all grossed over $100 million stateside in the past 15 years and still people act like "oh, musicals. dead genre. nobody will go see them!"...

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2016's Box Office Scorecard. Big & Minor Hits (Some Flops due to Budget)

Each day for the past two weeks we've been looking back on the year that was from different angles. Today, the biggest hits of 2016 in two different categories (franchise vs original).

It will surprise no one that the year's biggest hits continue to prove Hollywood right (sigh) in pursuing nothing but animated and superhero pictures and franchisable intellectual property and neglecting the nurturing of movies for adults. On the bright side quality pictures do occassionally break through audience resistance to original concepts and voices, often with the help of awards at year's end. So next time you hear people complain about awards season, remind them that we might never get movies made for adults if there weren't shiny gold statues to chase.

How many of these 35 pictures have you seen and which will you hit next? 

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Box Office Christmas: Star Wars, Hidden Figures, and More...

Star Wars is just going to be a thing every Christmas as ubiquitous as Santa one supposes. Rogue One continued to dominate the box office though if you ask your editor here it's kind of... dull (*dodges tomatoes*) and people wouldn't care much about it if it wasn't "a Star Wars". At the very least it's a bummer that it turned out to be just an exact prequel to the original Star Wars -- it really ought to have had an Episode III½ header -- and not a stand-alone adventure with some fresh ideas about that galaxy far far away.

Box office charts with a few points of discussion after the jump. What did you see this weekend? 

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Subtitles Fading But These Soldiers March On...

Year in Review. Every afternoon, a new wrap-up. Today an exhaustive list of how foreign films performed at the US box office...  

Perhaps no film is a more perfect encapsulation of the 2016 reality for foreign films in the US marketplace than Netflix's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon sequel. The first was an international theatrical phenomenon and a true blockbuster delivering over $100 million in the United States alone. The sequel sixteen years later was in English and went straight to streaming. 

Despite the inhospitable 21st century climate nowadays, specialty distributors fight on to deliver some variety to the US marketplace. Here's how they fared this year. These numbers were pulled from Box Office Mojo and we tried to be as thorough as possible (though we did skip documentaries and animated features which are sometimes screened in both dubbed and subtitled versions in the same marketplace)

TOP 100 FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILMS FOR 2016
By US Box Office Gross - final numbers. Title links go to reviews. 

01 Dangal $12.3 (India)

02 No Manches Frida $11.5 (USA) available to stream on IMDb

03 Sultan $6.2 (India)
Bollywood films account for a big portion of each year's foreign film grosses in the US. Up until the release of Dangal at Christmas, none were mightier for most of 2016 than the sports drama starring Salman Khan (pictured above).

Oscar Finalists, Isabelle Huppert, and buzzy Korean hits after the jump...

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