Box Office: Lord & Miller Slay the Dragon

Amir here with the weekend’s box office report. There was a huge surprise as How to Train Your Dragon 2, a critically acclaimed sequel to a massive box office success started at second place, a full $10m behind. Who’s the dragon slayer? Another critically acclaimed sequel to a massive box office success, 22 Jump Street. Still, despite the popularity of the first film and both Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill, few imagined the animated family option would fall behind the raunchy comedy, but so it is. This is all the more impressive considering the screen count of Dragon was one of the highest ever.

WEEKEND BOX OFFICE
01 22 JUMP STREET $60 NEW
02 HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2 $50 NEW
03 MALEFICENT $19 (cum. $163.5) Podcast
04 EDGE OF TOMORROW $16.1 (cum. $56.6) Capsule
05 THE FAULT IN OUR STARS $15.7 (cum. $81.7) Review

Still, despite the early receipts, I think the animated film will come out on top in the end, both because family films have better staying power and because competition in the next few weeks is non-existent. Of course, Lord & Miller, the filmmaking team behind the Jump Street franchise are no strangers to animation success. Earlier in the year, they opened The LEGO Movie to a $60m-plus opening as well; a double achievement that I believe is unique for any director in one calendar year. Correct me if I’m wrong on that count.

The top five list is rounded out with Maleficent, the unfortunately underselling Edge of Tomorrow and The Fault in Our Stars. Further down the list, The Rover, which played Cannes in May opened to respectable numbers on five screens – it had the second best per screen average of the weekend after Jump Street. (Glenn reviewed The Rover here.)

I haven’t yet seen any of the above films, because, Football people! Football! It’s the World Cup and the World Cup trumps all. What have you watched this weekend?

Tim's Toons: How to animate your dragon

Tim here. This weekend sees the release of How to Train Your Dragon 2, the first of just two major animated features coming out this summer (and having to imply that Planes 2: The Plane Fight Fire Now is a “major” film tastes like ash in my mouth). More importantly, it’s the sequel to a four-year-old film that’s broadly regarded as the best movie DreamWorks Animation has ever made. And there have been many appreciations advanced through the years as to why How to Train Your Dragon is so good – a comic tone that never trumps the basic sincerity of the story, John Powell’s gorgeous, Celtic-tinged score, the first actual decent animation of normal humans in the studio’s history – I can tell you pretty easily why it’s my own personal favorite: it’s the best movie about cats ever made.

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How To Link Your Flagon

I'm going to need a stiff drink tonight. (Should I blame the unpleasant Zorba the Greek?). Why is this week so hard? It's my birthday week! 

In Contention loves How To Train Your Dragon 2 and ranks all of Dreamworks Animation. God there's some dross in there but Prince of Egypt is way way too low
Variety on Jonah Hill's blooming career and recent homophobic slur 
AV Club looks back at Montgomery Clift in Red River (1948). My favorite Western
Gawker The Chicago Sun Times apologizes for a recent bit of transphobic nonsense regarding Laverne Cox (Orange is the New Black) that they MUST have known was unwise. People will publish anything to get clicks these days.

Playbill Bradley Cooper in The Elephant Man on stage this fall
Scene Magazine interviews Jonathan Groff on his Looking / Frozen gay ascendance (great photos)
Metro a woman wants a divorce from her husband because he didn't like Frozen
MNPP ooh, a Tilda Swinton image (very conservative look for her) from Trainwreck

The Bizness
Variety interviews the Academy Chairman of The Emmys on changes and controversies including 10 episodes vs. 22 and half hour versus hour shows
Empire Inception reunion: Tom Hardy in talks to join Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant (previously discussed)
Coming Soon Roland Emmerich's Stonewall finalizes its cast adding Jonathan Rhys Meyers and more
CHUD catches you up on who is directing what for Marvel including horror director Scott Derrickson taking on Dr. Strange
Awards Daily Jupiter Ascending pushed to February 2015

Today's Watch
"Philip Seymour Hoffman on Happiness"

This animated short, part of PBS's "Blank on Blank" series uses an interview conducted with the late actor from 2012. 

Fantastic Links and When To Blog Them

The Dissolve Alfonso Cuarón might direct the Harry Potter spinoff Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them. The internet seems largely happy about this which puzzles me. I understand everyone likes money but isn't this a huge step backwards after Children of Men/Gravity gave us his full auteurist muscle unbeholden to someone else's franchise? I most definitely think so
Pajiba wonders what was up with that airplane curtain closing wordless scene on Mad Men this weekend? 
The Film Doctor asks 9 questions about Godzilla before realizing he's too old for that shit. (I loved Godzilla so much myself that I've been surprised at the level of thumbs down in comments and online)  
/bent wonders why The Kids Are All Right's director Lisa Cholodenko hasn't yet made a follow up to that financially successful and Oscar nominated feature 

Towleroad one of the Vikings in How To Train Your Dragon 2 comes out as gay kinda. (But ParaNorman will always be first in this regard.)
Antagony & Ecstasy on the intuitive, fluid sensory experience of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and its companion novel
Slate Cliff Curtis, ethnic chameleon onscreen 
Gawker "selfie" is entering the dictionary. But why did it take "steampunk" this long?
MNPP JA zeroes in on one sweaty hairy detail of the Weinstein Co's Cannes preview: Southpaw's Jake Gyllenhaal 
The Wire wonders why the internet is so obsessed with Shrek --  I hadn't realized it was (just goes to show you how the interenet is not at all monolithic in terms of its obsessions  -- but this is an interesting article
The New Yorker if you're still grappling with your feelings about Godzilla here's a smart mixed take from Richard Brody which wrestles with the movies grandeur but lack of complexity and its largely passive human characters

Its scale may feel Biblical, but it doesn’t risk the crises and ecstasies, the sheer moral turbulence provoked by existential menace (cf. “Noah”). The monsters in the movie do monstrous battle, while people—the warriors ostensibly arrayed on the front lines against them—are reduced in the foreground to silhouetted spectators. They are the equivalent of the cutout characters of “Mystery Science Theatre 3000,” but without the comfort of a screen to separate them from the mayhem...

He Said / She Said
RogerEbert.com, which I always feel weird about linking to, since the link name always implies that Roger Ebert has written something new but he has of course departed from our mortal coil. Nevertheless, I started to enjoy these opposing pieces from  Michael Oleszczyk and Barbara Scharres on David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars until I remembered after the first couple of paragraphs each that I really really really want to go into this one fresh so I can't read anything. BUT if you're not as "sensitive" as I am about reading reviews before you've seen a movie, that's one rave and one pan from the same site so we are now free to call the movie "divisive" as often as we'd like. It's our favorite kind of critical response - homogeneity being so dreadfully dull. Oleszczyk and Richard Lawson at Vanity Fair both rave about Julianne Moore's performance and that's enough to excite me for now without really reading anything!

Speaking of Julianne Moore...

Here she is with Harrison Ford at a party at Cannes. Remember when nobody knew who she was but her walk in The Fugitive (1993) was so grabby anyway? #whowasthat 

You can see more photos from this particular party at Vanity Fair.

Previewing the animated features of 2014

Tim here. It’s the last edition of my weekly animation essay for 2013, which would ordinarily be the best time for a year-in-review piece. However, the year has been so rough for animation (remember Escape from Planet Earth? Are you happy about that fact?) that it seemed better just to quickly move beyond it and pretend it didn’t happen. Let us instead look with clear eyes and hopeful hearts to the future, and take a quick preview of the animated features that will be scattered throughout 2014. This isn’t meant to be comprehensive, but if I missed anything big, feel free to point it out in comments.

Films to maybe hold out hope for:

-The Lego Movie (February 7). The concept, and the cameos by DC superheroes, scream “branding exercise”, but with Phil Lord and Chris Miller on-hand as writers and directors, there’s reason to be hopeful. The duo has gone 2-for-2 so far with Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and 21 Jump Street, and that’s not a track record to idly dismiss. Besides, the trailer reveals that its laziest sins (a “Chosen One” narrative, celebrity voice cast) looks to be applied with a more playfully ironic touch than usual. And the random sense of humor looks different from the usual family fare, at any rate: the bit with Wonder Woman’s invisible jet gets me every time.

Dragons, Boxtrolls and more after the jump

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