"Little" is a hit but "Shazam!" stays on top

What did you see over the weekend? We waited until Monday night to get the full receipts on the arthouse releases (which often report late). Both Shazam! and The Mustang (still expanding) stayed on top in their second and fifth weekend respectively. It was a crowded weekend... well, overcrowded actually, since only the new comedy Little managed to make much of a box office impression of the 17 (gulp) new releases. Sadly Laika, our current favourite animation studio, had trouble. Missing Link proved their weakest opening by far with only $5.8 million (they generally manage about $14 million on opening weekends).

Here's the top ten in both wide and platform titles...

Weekend Box Office (Actuals) April 12th-14th  🔺 = new or expanded theater counts
W I D E	PLATFORM / LIMITED
1 Shazam!  $24.4 on 4306 screens (cum. $94.2)	1 🔺 The Mustang $773k on 527 screens (cum. $3.1)

2 🔺 Little  $15.4 on 2667 screens *NEW*	2 🔺  Amazing Grace $349k on 58 screens (cum. $589k)

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Review: Missing Link

by Chris Feil

Laika is back with another idiosyncratic stop-motion wonder and its their most chipper effort yet. Missing Link follows the animation house’s unique imagination down a rabbit hole of globe-trotting legend, delivering a buddy comedy that’s also about self-love and self-respect. As ever, Laika serves us such spectacular visuals and winning charm that it’s easy to overlook what is more familiar in the film. But this one finds the studio at their most unfettered, giving us a breezy treat that rings of a new level of confidence.

Hugh Jackman leads a surprisingly delightful voice cast as a seeker of rare creatures named Sir Lionel Frost. Attempting to join an elite society of beast hunters that mocks him, he sets off to America in search of Big Foot. What he finds is the gentile apeman Mr. Link, who in turn enlists Frost to guide him to the other side of the globe in search of  a storied tribe of yetis that could be Link’s closest biological kinfolk. With those uppercrust poachers pursuing them to usurp Frost’s discovery, Frost and Link are joined by the widowed Adelina Fortnight, and the three set off on a self-actualization journey into the unknown.

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Open Thread & Random Buzz

What movies are you thinking about right this very second?

I've got four movies playing in my head at the moment, two still imaginary and two just screened. The still-imaginary ones are, first, the Bill Condon / Sir Ian McKellen / Dame Helen Mirren thriller The Good Liar which got strong buzz out of the industry promo event CinemaCon. The second is the film adaptation of Cats which sounds Titanic-like (the boat not the movie) in its possibly epic high profile sinkability. Apparently the cats are not fully mocapped creatures but still look like the actors with fur digitally added but they're cat-sized (but why would they mention the cat-sized bit unless they shared scenes with humans which Nooooo).

As for the real movies that already exist in competed form, Laika has another winner with Missing Link (they've yet to make a stinker!) which we currently have in the 'most likely to be nominated' spot in the Best Animated Feature race. It opens in just one week so more on that one real soon. The other is Sebastian Schipper's Roads which we can't talk about yet because it doesn't premiere until later this month at Tribeca but let it be known that we love it. Oops. We weren't supposed to talk about it! But it's from the German director who made that exciting 'how'd he do that?' entirely continuous shot movie Victoria a couple of years back. This new film Roads could, like Victoria, be categoried in the subgenre of "Protagonist having dangerous and unexpected soul-shaking adventure whilst travelling abroad" movie but its much different so Schipper is no one-hit wonder or one-trick pony. The leads Fionn Whitehead (Dunkirk, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch) and Stéphane Bak (Elle, Farewell to the Night) have terrific chemistry. If you're planning to hit Tribeca, schedule it.

What's on your cinematic mind? 

Linkin' what comes naturally

• MNPP Corey Stoll has joined the cast of Spielberg's West Side Story remake as Office Krupke and a bunch of other new movies too. Yay.
• Polygon all the things Disney owns now with the Fox deal completed. Cultural hegemony be frightening, people! (So over the past 20 years or so Disney, 20th Century Fox, Lucasfilm, Pixar, ABC, and Marvel have become one company essentially)
• Variety ...has an analysis of what this new Media Giant movement might mean for the future

More after the jump including Fiddler on the Roof, Missing Link, a reaction to all the memes about Bohemian Rhapsody's terrible Oscar-winning editing and famous movie characters you didn't know were on the down low. Lol...

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