Tiffany on Top. What did you see?

by Nathaniel R

A quick perusal of this weekend's top movies in wide (left) and limited (right) release. Commentary after the jump...

Weekend Box Office Estimates (September 28th-30th)
W I D E 800+ screens	PLATFORM / LIMITED excluding prev. wide
1. 🔺 NIGHT SCHOOL $28 *NEW*	1. THE WIFE $777K on 437 screens (cum. $6.1) Review, Poster Blurb, Glenn's Oscar

2. 🔺 SMALLFOOT $23 *NEW* Warner Animation Movies	2. 🔺LITTLE WOMEN $747k on 643 screens

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Box Office: The Accountant and Certain Women

Though awards season has started outside of movie theaters it definitely hasn't started within them (a flaw of the system as we continuously bemoan) and The Birth of a Nation took another campaign hit this weekend dropping a rough 61% in its second weekend while its competition last weekend dimmed by only 38 to 50% in round two. This week was a battle between two films from reliably bankable stars without awards gold on their mind -- Kevin Hart's Kevin Hart: What Now? and Ben Affleck in the thriller The Accountant. The latter surprised by slightly outperforming the successful opening weekends of both Argo and The Town despite having nothing like their enthusiastic reviews. 

TOP TEN WIDE
01 The Accountant $24.7 NEW 
02 Kevin Hart: What Now? $11.9 NEW
03 The Girl on the Train $11.9 (cum. $46.5) Review
04 Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children $8.9 (cum. $65.8)
05 Deepwater Horizon $6.3 (cum. $49.3) 
06 Storks $5.6 (cum. $59.1)
07 The Magnificent Seven $5.2 (cum. $84.8) Review
08 Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life $4.2 (cum. $13.7)
09 Sully $2.7 (cum. $118.3) Review
10 Birth of a Nation $2.7 (cum. $12.2) More

TOP TEN LIMITED
01 Priceless $703K NEW 
02 Desierto $450K NEW Mexico's Oscar Submission
03 Denial $398K (cum. $839K) Review
04 A Man Called Ove $205K (cum. $436K) Sweden's Oscar Submission
05 The Dressmaker $171K (cum. $1.3) 
06 American Honey $142K (cum. $362K) Review
07 The Beatles: Eight Days a Week $123K (cum. $2.5) Review
08 No Manches Frida $110K (cum. $11.3)
09 M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story $80K (cum. $1.7)
10 Certain Women $65K NEW Review

In limited release Certain Women, just off of its NYFF festival bow, posted the strongest per screen average (albeit only on 5 screens) with the animated feature Miss Hokusai (part of a very competitive Best Animated Feature race this year) not far behind on just two screens.

What did you see this weekend?

Thoughts I Had... The "Jumanji" Cast

Chris here. Do you remember 1995's Jumanji? That 90s kids classic still holds up today, so naturally we have a remake coming our way. Stars Dwayne Johnson and Jack Black are no strangers to family entertainment, and they're also bringing along the bankability of Kevin Hart and fan favorite Karen Gillan. Here's a first look at what they have in store:

... and I have some thoughts:

• What is this Lara Croft ensemble Gillan is giving us? I'm no prude, but oversexualizing the only woman for a kids movie seems a bit much.
• No seriously, she can't be wearing that little clothes because the jungle is so hot. Jack Black is wearing seventeen layers.
• Does this crew go inside the game? The point of Jumanji is that the wild comes to you.
• Johnson and Black have done plenty of family fare, but Kevin Hart is actually an inspired choice for this kind of entertainment. Can you believe The Secret Life of Pets was his first voiceover work?
• Remember Johnathan Hyde's hunter villain in the original and how Hyde was seemingly the villain in all mid-90s movies? I wonder if we'll get another stock villain actor here too.
• ... sigh What's Bonnie Hunt up to these days?

Jumanji opens next summer. Do you have fond memories of the original?

Ava & Oprah

Kieran, here.  It was recently announced that Ava DuVernay would direct an adaptation of the classic children’s fantasy novel A Wrinkle in Time for Disney starring Oprah Winfrey. The script is to be penned by Frozen scribe and co-director Jennifer Lee and will also star Amy Adams and Kevin Hart. Winfrey is also collaborating with DuVernay (off screen) in the capacity of executive producer for the upcoming OWN series “Queen Sugar” staring Rutina Wesley (“True Blood”). 

While A Wrinkle in Time may seem like an odd career zag on paper for nearly everyone involved, pairing Ava DuVernay and Oprah Winfrey together again after 2014’s justifiably lauded Selma should have movie-watchers willing to follow this director-actor duo to the ends of the Earth...

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Oscar Telecast Ratings Hit Eight-Year Low

We’re currently awash in Oscar numbers and statistics, but there’s another Oscars number to be taken into account. After much discussion of the Academy as an entity leading up to Sunday night, it seemed like public interest would be high going into the ceremony, particularly given the Leo narrative and some high-grossing nominees like The Revenant, The Martian and Mad Max: Fury Road. But numbers for the Oscars telecast for this year have come in, and the Chris Rock-hosted show fell 6 percent to 34.3 million viewers in preliminary numbers and an eight-year ratings low...

If you haven’t already read Kieran’s analysis of Rock’s hosting stint you definitely should, because he gets at a lot of reasons why the ceremony was so uneven and might have put people off watching. But the most telling aspect of the ceremony’s ratings is that the 18-49 demographic only dropped 5 percent, which means that much of the lost audience was older viewers...

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