Imogen Potts in 'Black Christmas'
The news was good for Jumanji: The Next Level (a $19.4 million Friday and a probable $50 million debut weekend), but it was grim for everything else. Blumhouse and Universal’s Black Christmas earned a frankly miserable $1.8 million on Friday, including $230,000 in Thursday previews. The PG-13 horror remake of Bob Clark’s trendsetting 1974 slasher, which was previously remade as an ultraviolent R-rated slasher flick in 2006, is on track to earn just $4.5 million for the weekend. Yes, the film cost $5 million to produce and yes it opened a little better than Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell, but this is a tragedy. It’s sadly Universal’s second disappointing Christmas flick after Paul Feig and Emma Thompson’s Last Christmas (which, to be fair, may break even thanks to decent overseas numbers).
If Cats doesn’t do its thing next weekend, and it’s frankly a coin toss as to whether it plays like The Phantom of the Opera or Into the Woods, Universal will end the year with something of a losing streak. That said, Sam Mendes’ 1917, platforming on Christmas and going wide on January 10, is perhaps the best movie of the year and a surefire Oscar contender. On the other hand, Doctor Dolittle, opening January 17, could (partially thanks to an obscene $175 million budget) be January’s biggest grosser and its biggest flop, but I digress. As for Black Christmas, I’d argue that this is a case where Blumhouse and friends would have been better off ditching the IP and just selling and outright original horror movie that merely ripped off Black Christmas.
The brand doesn’t have hardwired popularity like Halloween and when you’ve got a $5 million budget you don’t really need the IP. Penned by Sophia Takal and April Wolfe and directed by Takal, the movie is pretty good, but holding up the embargo to the last minute created an impression of dissatisfaction. The eventual reviews weren’t glowing, but A) it’s a horror movie and B) it had enough fans in the horror community that word might have spread earlier. That said, the PG-13 movie is pretty unpleasant and brutally violent, intentionally so, and it may just be a case of moviegoers (including the targeted young female demographics) not wanting to pay $15 to see 90 minutes of innocent young women being butchered by misogynistic men. “Empowering” or cathartic payoffs aside, it’s not exactly escapism.
Kathy Bates, Sam Rockwell, and Paul Walter Hauser in Clint Eastwood's 'Richard Jewell'
If anyone out there wants to look at the Black Christmas numbers and argue that it’s another case of “get woke, go broke,” they might want to also note that Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell opened even worse this weekend. The somewhat well-reviewed drama about the security guard who found himself a suspect in the 1996 Olympic Park bombing after alerting authorities to a suspicious package earned just $1.5 million on Friday, setting the stage for a $4.46 million opening weekend. The film, starring Paul Walter Hauser, Sam Rockwell, Jon Hamm and Olivia Wilde, has come under the media spotlight of late due to a scene which arguably implies that Wilde’s reporter (a real person who died in 2001) got the scoop about Jewell’s status as a suspect after the Olympic Park bombing in exchange for sleeping with Hamm’s FBI agent.
I took it as two ridiculously attractive colleagues having casual sex after a business drink, still not great but not quite the same thing. Alas, it still plays into the “female journalists sleep with their sources” trope in movies, and it goes against the core point of a story that details how big-n-powerful organizations can rush to judgment and/or implicitly condemn prematurely via incomplete information or existing bias. It has damaged the otherwise pretty good movie’s standing (it’s weirdly funny, to where Wilde’s cartoonish performance almost fits right in, up until the overly melodramatic final 25 minutes) in terms of how it’s discussed in the media. Granted, it probably didn’t impact the box office, and its biggest shot at Oscar glory remains a Best Actor nod for Hauser.
Media attention aside, it’s just another one of Warner Bros.’ failed attempts to get audiences to actually see a conventional studio programmer in theaters. They’ve died on the cross over the last few months, fighting the good fight and offering the likes of Blinded by the Light, The Kitchen, The Goldfinch, The Good Liar and now Richard Jewell to relatively empty theaters. Ironically, the only salvation has been their two R-rated horror flicks about killer clowns, It Chapter Two and Joker, as even the ambitious Doctor Sleep stumbled in relation to its $45 million budget. When Warner Bros.’ 2021 or 2022 slate is nothing but DC Films flicks, horror flicks and monster movies, well, you can’t say they didn’t try. If you don’t see it, Hollywood won’t make it.
'Bombshell'
There were three platform launches this weekend, all of which offered much better news. The Sadfie Brothers’ Uncut Gems, a powerhouse thriller starring Adam Sandler in the best dramatic performance of his career, earned a whopping $210,000 in five theaters on Friday, setting the stage for a $560,000 weekend and ridiculous $112,000 per-theater average. If that holds, it’ll be the 12th-biggest per-theater average ever (counting Red State’s roadshow tour in 2010), the biggest in A24’s history and the second-biggest of the year behind Neon’s Parasite. It’ll go wide on Christmas day, where it will play alongside Spies in Disguise and Little Women. Meanwhile, Fox Searchlight opened Terrence Malick’s acclaimed World War II drama A Hidden Life into five theaters, where it’ll earn $51,000 for a $10,142 per-theater average.
But Lionsgate’s Bombshell, a star-studded retelling of the sexual harassment scandal that brought down Fox News boss Roger Ailes, opened in four theaters on Friday and earned a whopping $134,000 yesterday. That sets Jay Roach’s flick, starring Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, Margot Robbie and John Lithgow, up for a very promising $370,000 weekend and $92,500 per-theater-average. Will audiences flock to multiplexes to see powerful men being awful to their female employees or coworkers? I’m not sure, but the reviews are decent, the film does have a murderer’s row of talent, it’s being sold as “fun,” and this this platform launch will buy Lionsgate a week of positive press. It goes wide on December 20 alongside Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and Cats.
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2019-12-14 16:46:22Z
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