Year in Review: Special Interest Box Office, 7 Categories

Our year in review party continues. Different lists each day. Here's Nathaniel R

We intended to kick off this list of "niche" box office categories with a list of the top grossers that were made for very little money but budget figures are hard to come by (consistently that is) and often difficult to parse. Is publicity and adveristing included? Back when I first started becoming interested in movies I was reading somewhere that a movie needed to make about 2.5 times its budget to break even. Who knows if that general rule is still accurate these days when the finances of the movie industry have shifted so dramatically and films often use their theatrical run as more of a commercial for their other runs (streaming, bluray, tv rights, etcetera). 

But let it suffice to say that some movies made on the cheap made their investors very happy this year. Parasite, so far as we can gather, was made for about $11 million and its worldwide tally is at $161 million and still rising. It's already the 8th highest grossing Palme d'Or winner ever. That's a major success by any metric.

Elsewhere in crazy return on investment horror movies continue to be a safe investment, even the ambitious ones...

Now, on to 7 more concrete box office lists. What follows are top hits in interesting subcategories like "female director, "lgbtq films" and more. We tried our best to collect accurate data but we apologize in advance for any unintentional stumbles in these underrecorded/underdiscussed areas of moviemaking. It's also worth noting that for reasons we aren't quite sure about almost all US box office sites include Canadian figures (without any differentiation). We know for example that Xavier Dolan's latest didn't open in the US but it's included in all box office reports so we're including it here. This is also presumably why Bollywood films always report higher grosses than we expect, given their total lack of media coverage in the States, since Canadian figures are included.

(Figures below are as of March 12th, 2020) 

TOP GROSSING FILMS THAT NEVER WENT INTO WIDE RELEASE IN THE US
We count 800 theaters as "wide" though some sites draw that line at 600 screens. 

Last Black Man in San Francisco

01 No Manches Frida 2 (Pantelion, March 15th) $9.2 March 15th (472 screens)
02 Apollo 11 (Neon, March 1st) $9.0 (588 screens)
03 The Dead Don't Die (Focus) $6.5 (690 screens)
04 The Wandering Earth (CMC. Feb 5th) $5.8 (129 screens)
05 Gully Boy (Viva Pictures, Feb 14th) $5.5  (270 screens)
06 The Mustang (Focus. March 15th) $5.0 (527screens)...

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A Conversation About "Westworld" - Part 2

A conversation between Lynn Lee and Kieran Scarlett. At the end of Part 1 of the discussion, Lynn left us to wonder just how long "Westworld" can keep this story going. We pick up where we left off.

Warning: Spoilers Ahead

Kieran:  That’s an excellent point about Marsden and Wood’s performances that I hadn’t considered. I did think Wood was much more compelling in the second episode than she was in the pilot. I found myself adjusting to the tonal rhythms of her performance, which are quite specific. I appreciate that there isn’t a rigid uniformity to how the actors portray AIs. Each has their own texture and we’re not just watching actors play mindless automatons, which would have been so boring. That we get insight into their creators and programmers based on how each AI behaves is also an intriguing facet to the performances that I suspect will be explored more fully as the series progresses.

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Q&A: "Who is that?" Actors, Streep Classics, and Gendered Oscars

Last week there were too many questions we wanted to answer to fit it all into one post so here's a second round up of eight reader questions and brief answers. Ahem. (One answer is most definitely not brief.)

MATT ST CLAIR:  When I saw Laura Linney in the trailer for Sully, my heart sank because it saddened me to see another great actress stuck in those stock "wife worrying over the phone" roles. When do you think Hollywood will ever get tired of seeing older women portrayed as supportive wifes or mothers and let more of them be in charge of their own stories?

How I wish I had a good answer to this. The answer might be a more diverse body of people telling stories because then chances are slightly better that it won't always be straight white 30-50something men as protagonists. Now, it's worth noting that it's been largely straight white men directing movies for about 100 years now and there were periods, long before our modern one, when men in charge of storytelling were interested in women and knew how to showcase them. I don't know what happened to make the alpha directors so disinterested in women's stories but whatever it was, I hate it. I guess it changed around the time Scorsese, Coppola, and Spielberg all exploded into fame together (not that we're blaming them) and none of them happened to have much interest in the ladies beyond a key atypical project each. As time wore on into the 80s and 90s less and less female projects were made. Give us more descendants of William Wyler, Douglas Sirk, and Alfred Hitchcock, Hollywood! We've got enough Spielberg & Scorsese acolytes to last another 50 years.

JAMES FROM AMES:  What character actor's performance was so good it made you go from "hey, it's that guy" to "who is THAT?" and start following their work? For me: Mary Kay Place just floored me in Being John Malkovich. I was so pleased when she popped up in Lady Dynamite this year.

Mary Kay Place on the 7½ floor in "Being John Malkovich"

Mary Kay Place is a wonder, isn't she?...

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