The Box Office

[Gaastra]

Still waiting for friday numbers but dune expected to make $18m thanks to hbo max still that's not to bad.

Last Night in Soho projected $8.3 m.

My Hero Academia: World Heroes’ Mission is projected to open with $8m.

The French Dispatch with $3.1 m.

Antlers at $3.6m.

Will they be right? We will find out soon.

https://www.mediaplaynews.com/warner...ox-office-win/

[Gaastra]

Dune drops 62% thanks to hbo max.

Saturday AM Update: The first Halloween in two years during the pandemic is taking its toll on the domestic box office, a grey cloud which many saw coming, with many trick-or-treating or heading to parties tonight.

And, yes, we can blame HBO Max too, when it comes to Legendary/Warner Bros.’ expected -62% decline for Dune which looks to be filing $15.5M for the weekend after a $5M Friday, -71% from a week ago. The Denis Villeneuve directed reboot of the Frank Herbert novel, which Warners and Legendary have already greenlit a theatrical windowed sequel for, had a solid week of $53.8M. Even though Godzilla vs. Kong debuted on a Wednesday, comparing that Legendary title’s first ten days to Dune, and the latter looks to be running ahead by 17% with some rivals predicting a possible $70M running total by EOD Sunday. Godzilla vs. Kong crossed $100M after 13 weekends. A reminder that these HBO Max theatrical day-and-date titles are on the service for the first 31 days, after which exhibition gets the title exclusively during its second month. Torrent Freak reports that Dune was the most pirated movie for the week ending Oct. 25.

For the scary movies.

After Dune it’s a mishmash of arthouse genre titles which were never expected to rally given how they’re largely aimed at upscale crowds, who are slowly creeping back, but not in massive numbers. That said, they did did have a lot of choices this weekend: Focus Feature’s Edgar Wright fantasy thriller Last Night in Soho with $4.3M at 3,016 theaters, and Searchlight’s Antlers at 2,800 venues with an estimated $4.1M.

Hero may get 3rd place.

And, there’s also Funimation’s My Hero Academia: World Heroes’ Mission booked at 1,602 theaters this weekend which is also grabbing some of the fanboys away from Dune and Last Night in Soho eyeing a third place slot of $7.9M after Universal/Blumhouse/Miramax’s Halloween Kills in second place with $8.75M in weekend 3, -39% for a running cume by EOD Sunday of $85.9M. There weren’t any previews on Thursday for My Hero Academia, but the pic is booked at 4DX, Dbox and some PLFs posting a $2.88M Friday with 1,577 locations reporting. The film is available as both subtitled in Japanese or dubbed in English. This is the third film in the My Hero Academia franchise after My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising last year and My Hero Academia: Two Heroes in 2018. Movie is produced by Toho Co. Ltd., Shueisha and Studio BONES. Funimation has seven of top 20 highest-grossing anime box office releases at the domestic B.O., including My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising ($13.3M) and My Hero Academia: Two Heroes ($5.8M domestic).

Addams 2 expected to get a halloween boost as well this weekend.

https://deadline.com/2021/10/dune-la...ce-1234864873/

[Gaastra]

Dune comes in first as expected.

Halloween kils gets a boost from halloween to come in second.

My hero 3 was getting third but bond comes out of nowhere and hits third place!

My hero 3 makes 4th beating both new horror films!

Venom rounds out the top 5.

Both scary films bomb. Note addams 2 got a boost for halloween and ghostbusters rerelease did well also.

[Wildling]

Both scary films bomb. Note addams 2 got a boost for halloween and ghostbusters rerelease did well also.

Scary numbers for Antlers and Last Night in Soho. 4-5 million would be fine for some indie/arthouse* flick, not widely released movies with recognizable talent attached (see The Last Duel, not horror but still insta-bomb and with the biggest amount of talent attached so far). The movies you actually name are from known properties. I fear even the horror genre is falling prey to theatrical franchesitis which is why the horror movies recently breaking 100 million worldwide are Halloween Kills, the third Conjuring and the second A Quiet Place. Heck even a new Paw Patrol passed 100 million around the world. Reasons I hope this could be temporary or just not happen 100% of the time later after the pandemic abates is because A Quiet Place is a brand new franchise in the first place, and Shyamalan's Old made a good try to reach 100 million with 90 million, practically the same as Alexandre Aja's Crawl movie in 2019.

*Apparently A Night in Soho is considered arthouse. At least my local theater certainly did, showing before it trailers for more "adult or not fantastical" stuff like King Richards and House of Gucci, instead of trailers for the new Resident Evil and Scream movies that played with other horror movies. I just went in expecting a kookier horror film and that's what I got. I expect it to easily make it into my top 5-10 horror movies of the year, along with Malignant, once I think more about it.

[chicago_bastard]

Scary numbers for Antlers and Last Night in Soho. 4-5 million would be fine for some indie/arthouse* flick, not widely released movies with recognizable talent attached (see The Last Duel, not horror but still insta-bomb and with the biggest amount of talent attached so far). The movies you actually name are from known properties. I fear even the horror genre is falling prey to theatrical franchesitis which is why the horror movies recently breaking 100 million worldwide are Halloween Kills, the third Conjuring and the second A Quiet Place. Heck even a new Paw Patrol passed 100 million around the world. Reasons I hope this could be temporary or just not happen 100% of the time later after the pandemic abates is because A Quiet Place is a brand new franchise in the first place, and Shyamalan's Old made a good try to reach 100 million with 90 million, practically the same as Alexandre Aja's Crawl movie in 2019.

*Apparently A Night in Soho is considered arthouse. At least my local theater certainly did, showing before it trailers for more "adult or not fantastical" stuff like King Richards and House of Gucci, instead of trailers for the new Resident Evil and Scream movies that played with other horror movies. I just went in expecting a kookier horror film and that's what I got. I expect it to easily make it into my top 5-10 horror movies of the year, along with Malignant, once I think more about it.

Antlers can be considered arthouse, too. Scott Cooper is an auteur filmmaker and made films like Crazy Heart or Hostiles beforehand.

[basbash99]

Dune drops 62% thanks to hbo max.

I'm not sure we can really chalk that drop up to hbo max, isn't the normal drop around 50% anyhow? And we're talking about a long, fairly slow sci-fi movie that ends in the middle of the story. I think word of mouth might not be as good as some people think .. i know i'd be somewhat selective in whom i recommend it to. I thought it was OK but not worth waiting an extra year for, especially since they didn't use that extra year to start any work on the 2nd half of the story, apparently.

But i won't argue that Dune would've made significantly more opening weekend had it not also been available on HBO Max, where i watched it. As to whether any boost to HBO Max subscriptions offsets lost box office, who knows. I think Disney was smart to go back to the old model with Shang-Chi, Free guy, Eternals, etc.

[Kirby101]

Also, I doubt Dune had repeat customers. I think movies like Shang Chi, which are great action and fun, bring more people back than a movie like Dune. More likely repeat viewings were on HBOMax.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

Well by 2022 the whole HBO Max deal is ending. In its place for 2022 is a 45 day exclusive deal to theaters for released films. That is for 2022 , it likely will slowly itch back to the next 90 days again it once was before Pandemic.

[inisideguy]

All I know is the New James Bond movie is doing some great numbers overseas.

[Username taken]

All I know is the New James Bond movie is doing some great numbers overseas.

Yeah.

I believe its in the top 10 biggest British films ever.

It's around $600 million WW which is pretty massive.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

Yeah.

I believe its in the top 10 biggest British films ever.

It's around $600 million WW which is pretty massive.

As good as that sounds from what was told in a report weeks ago the film would need $900+ million to...break even. Given that its budget is between $250-$300+ million with added marketing costs etc to that. So its a huge expensive film and while the box office sounds great ....Universal Pictures and other company aren't pleased as much given the take for it.

[Jim Kelly]

Terms like "art house" and "auteur" hardly have any meaning now.

There are very few art house theatres left, so I doubt even the very low budget movies are making money by playing just to art houses. Maybe in New York or L.A.--but a lot of independent theatres have closed in most cities. And what is an art house movie? In the 1980s, when there were more independent theatres, the programming was all over the map and didn't favour one genre or another--budgets also varied wildly.

Auteur was coined by the CAHIER DU CINÉMA in the 1950s and 1960s. It simply means that the director is the author of the film. They looked at old movies and decided that the true author of a movie was Jean Renoir or Max Ophuls or Alfred Hitchcock or Orson Welles. This seems obvious now, but in old Hollywood, producers thought they were the authors of the film and the director was just a hired gun. You could make that argument with someone like David O. Selznick--he produced GONE WITH THE WIND which had five different directors. But it's a general assumption that the director is the author of the movie, which is why the D.G.A. is so touchy about who gets the director credit.

So every director who works on a movie is assumed to be the author--and thus an auteur. Even when the studio took away movies from the director and butchered them--like with Welles and Snyder--the director was considered the auteur.

How much or how little is spent on a movie has nothing to do with its artistic worth. A programmer for an indie theatre might choose to do a retrospective for Akira Kurosawa or Russ Meyer or Mel Brooks. It's all the same.

As far as horror movies go, most have relatively low budgets. So even if they don't get in the top five on an opening weekend, they still have a better chance of making back their money than big budget effects extravaganzas. Are low budget horror movies to be considered art house movies? Are the directors considered auteurs? Yes and yes. Because any movie can be an art house movie and all movies are made by auteurs.

[Kirby101]

As good as that sounds from what was told in a report weeks ago the film would need $900+ million to...break even. Given that its budget is between $250-$300+ million with added marketing costs etc to that. So its a huge expensive film and while the box office sounds great ....Universal Pictures and other company aren't pleased as much given the take for it.

That doesn't sound right. Spectre made $880 million. Why would they make a movie that had to beat that just to make a profit.

Also rule of thumb is twice the budget is break even.

[thwhtGuardian]

That doesn't sound right. Spectre made $880 million. Why would they make a movie that had to beat that just to make a profit.

Also rule of thumb is twice the budget is break even.

It doesn't make sense to me either, and I suspect there is a lot of movie studio math going on to make it so but it is something that has been reported widely.

[chicago_bastard]

Auteur was coined by the CAHIER DU CINÉMA in the 1950s and 1960s. It simply means that the director is the author of the film. They looked at old movies and decided that the true author of a movie was Jean Renoir or Max Ophuls or Alfred Hitchcock or Orson Welles. This seems obvious now, but in old Hollywood, producers thought they were the authors of the film and the director was just a hired gun. You could make that argument with someone like David O. Selznick--he produced GONE WITH THE WIND which had five different directors. But it's a general assumption that the director is the author of the movie, which is why the D.G.A. is so touchy about who gets the director credit.

So every director who works on a movie is assumed to be the author--and thus an auteur.

That every director is an auteur is definitely not the correct definition. Cahiers du cinema reserved the term to directors with a distinct style, they never deemed some hired director who just followed orders from the studio as an auteur. According to them the director SHOULD always be the author of a movie but it isn't always the case, that's why they singled out certain directors like Hitchcock or Welles who were auteurs in their view. Back then Truffaut even excluded the majority of contemporary French directors from the term and distinguished them from auteurs like Hitchcock or Welles. The whole point of Truffaut, Godard, et al. starting the French New Wave was them being dissatisfied with the state of contemporary French cinema which mostly consisted of directors doing work for hire and NOT being auteurs.

Scott Cooper is mostly directing movies he wants to do and is also writing the screenplays for most of them (similar to the likes of Tarantino or Nolan, albeit on a smaller scale). These are arguments to label him as an auteur. A director who gets hired by a studio/producer to direct an already finished script and does as he was told without putting his distinct stamp to it is hardly the author of said movie. Take the Bond franchise for example, it's ridiculous to claim that the directors of all these movies up to Skyfall were authors of the respective movies. Most of them were hired and did what the producers had in mind for the franchise. That's definitely not what Cahiers Du cinema meant with the term.