Paramount is hoping to bring in an older female audience next Friday with the release of BookClub. The comedy casts the quartet of Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen as members of a reading group who become influenced by their latest selection, FiftyShadesofGrey. The pic marks the directorial debut of Bill Holderman and costars include Andy Garcia, Don Johnson, Richard Dreyfuss, Craig T. Nelson, and Alicia Silverstone.
As mentioned, this Club hopes to capitalize on an often underserved market. Yet there is at least one other title appealing to females as LifeoftheParty will be in its sophomore frame and possibly still in lower double digits.
I’ll estimate this manages high single digits to low double digits itself out of the gate as it’ll likely hope for smallish declines in subsequent frames.
BookClub opening weekend prediction: $10.3 million
I’m not an attorney, but I’ve heard of the legal term known as Clean Hands. I might have heard it first from Judge Judy. Regardless, in layman’s speak, it means a defendant claims that a plaintiff can’t argue for equal remedy because they’re engaged in bad acts as well. I realize a lawyer might challenge my interpretation, but I’m reviewing a movie and I’m not on trial. Clean Hands could have been a more appropriate name than what I’m writing about, but instead we have the more pretentious TheKillingofaSacredDeer from director Yorgos Lanthimos.
The aggrieved party in our story is teenager Martin (Barry Keoghan), whose father died three years ago in a surgery performed by Dr. Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell, reuniting with his TheLobster director). The two befriend each other after the incident and Martin is eventually ingratiating himself with the doc’s family – wife Anna (Nicole Kidman), teen daughter Kim (Raffey Cassidy), and younger brother Bob (Sunny Suljic). Martin seems a bit strange and too eager to please, but his motives turn out far darker. He blames the doctor for his loss and plans to exact revenge.
Lanthimos isn’t interested with playing in the run of the mill revenge fantasy thriller genre. No family pet is harmed in the making of his screenplay with Efthymis Filippou, though there is one. Instead Martin wants to harm the family and any one of them will do. He also manages to capture the heart of Kim while he moves forward with his acts.
TheKillingofaSacredDeer is a dark and unsettling experience that sometimes struggles to earn the pain we go through watching it. From a technical standpoint, it’s often expertly rendered with a Kubrick like sense of clinical precision and a loud and evocative score. Farrell and Kidman (just seen together in The Beguiled) are just fine as the parents facing increasingly difficult circumstances and choices, but it’s Keoghan who electrifies plenty of his scenes. His misguided Martin gets under everyone’s skin, including ours.
That said, the style of Deer is frequently more potent than its subject and I struggled with whether it was worth it in the end. For all its bells and whistles, it kind of is a typical revenge fantasy with art house touches. Dr. Murphy may have made his mistakes, but there’s a Clean Hands defense when he discovers Martin’s bad acts. For this viewer, I offer a mixed defense of the picture itself.
Put on your nostalgia goggles (or maybe the sunglasses that make you forget stuff if Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones flash a light at you) because I’m recounting the summer of 1997 on the blog today!
This has become a seasonal tradition around here and I gave you the top 10 summer hits of 1987 and more earlier this week. If you missed that post, you can find it here:
This time around, we’re going back 20 years when Nicolas Cage accounted for 25% of the top 8 moneymakers and Batman crashed and burned.
We’ll begin with the top ten and then get to some other notable pics and flops:
10. Hercules
Domestic Gross: $99 million
Disney’s ‘toon couldn’t reach the century mark and that was considered a disappointment after early and mid 90s smashes like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King.
9. Contact
Domestic Gross: $100 million
Robert Zemeckis’s follow-up to Forrest Gump (which ruled summer 1994) was a well-regarded science fiction drama with Jodie Foster and an emerging Matthew McConaughey.
8. Con Air
Domestic Gross: $101 million
This action thriller from the Bruckheimer factory is our first to feature Mr. Nicolas Cage (who was coming off a recent Oscar win), along with an all-star cast including John Cusack, John Malkovich, Steve Buscemi, and Ving Rhames.
7. George of the Jungle
Domestic Gross: $105 million
Disney probably didn’t anticipate this remake of the cartoon starring Brendan Fraser would manage to out perform Hercules, but that it did.
6. Batman and Robin
Domestic Gross: $107 million
This may have placed sixth for the summer, but Batman and Robin came in well below its three predecessors and director Joel Schumacher and new Caped Crusader George Clooney have been apologizing about it for the last 20 years. We’re still trying to block out those Arnold/Mr. Freeze bad puns.
5. Face/Off
Domestic Gross: $112 million
Mr. Cage teamed up for Mr. John Travolta for John Woo’s entertainingly over-the-top sci-fi and action mash-up.
4. My Best Friend’s Wedding
Domestic Gross: $127 million
Julia Roberts made a return to box office dominance in this rom com which featured stolen scenes from costar Rupert Everett.
3. Air Force One
Domestic Gross: $172 million
“Get off my plane!” became one of the season’s catchphrases with Harrison Ford as the butt kicking POTUS battling Russian terrorist Gary Oldman in the skies.
2. The Lost World: Jurassic Park
Domestic Gross: $229 million
Steven Spielberg’s eagerly anticipated follow-up to 1993’s Jurassic Park kicked off with the biggest opening weekend of all time (at that time). However, in the end, it couldn’t manage to top the gross of its predecessor. If you’d polled probably any box office analyst at the beginning of the year, they likely would have said it’d be #1 for the summer. Yet that honor ended up belonging to…
1. Men in Black
Domestic Gross: $250 million
A franchise was born and Will Smith made it two summers in a row with the top grossing picture (the previous year being Independence Day) with Barry Sonnenfeld’s megahit sci-fi action comedy.
And now for some other notable pics:
The Fifth Element
Domestic Gross: $63 million
Audiences and critics didn’t quite know what to make of Luc Besson’s visual feast featuring Bruce Willis, Gary Oldman, and Chris Tucker. Sound familiar? Same thing is happening 20 years later with Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
Domestic Gross: $53 million
The Mike Myers 007 spoof performed well, but it wasn’t until home video that Powers turned into a genuine phenomenon spawning countless catchphrases. Its sequel two summers later would earn more in its opening weekend that part 1 did in its domestic total.
The Full Monty
Domestic Gross: $45 million
This British import about unconventional male strippers was the summer’s true sleeper and went on to earn a host of Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. Monty would earn over $250 million worldwide compared to its tiny $3.5 million budget.
Cop Land
Domestic Gross: $44 million
After appearing in a string of high-octane action flicks, Sylvester Stallone changed it up with this crime drama featuring an impressive supporting cast that included Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, and Harvey Keitel.
And now for some of the season’s large belly flops:
Speed 2: Cruise Control
Domestic Gross: $48 million
Keanu Reeves didn’t want to touch it, but Sandra Bullock came back for this ridiculed sequel where Jason Patric was the new lead. Considered by many to be one of the worst follow-ups of all time.
Out to Sea
Domestic Gross: $29 million
Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau created comedic gold with The Fortune Cookie and The Odd Couple and reunited years later to box office fortune with the Grumpy Old Men movies. This one? Not so much.
Father’s Day
Domestic Gross: $28 million
Ivan Reitman directing Robin Williams and Billy Crystal in a high-profile comedy? Sounds like a good recipe, but the product was mediocre at best and audiences didn’t turn out.
Excess Baggage
Domestic Gross: $14 million
Two summers earlier, Alicia Silverstone had broken out with Clueless. The summer of 1997 was a breakdown. In addition to appearing as Batgirl in the already discussed Batman and Robin, this action comedy with Benicio del Toro bombed big time.
Steel
Domestic Gross: $1.7 million
People may have wanted to watch Shaquille O’Neal on the basketball court, but they had zero interest in watching him as the title superhero in this disaster.
And that does it for now, folks, but I’ll be back soon recounting 2007!
The fourth film in a franchise that’s been dormant for half a decade, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul debuts in theaters next weekend. The family comedy features an all-new cast from the three previous entries, but returns David Bowers, who directed the last two Wimpy sagas. That new cast includes Jason Drucker, Alicia Silverstone, and Tom Everett Scott.
Based upon a series of popular kids books penned by Jeff Kinney, The Long Haul has experienced the aforementioned long layoff between projects. Let’s take a trip down Wimpy Kid‘s box office memory lane, shall we?
Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2010) – $22 million opening, $64 million overall domestic gross
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules (2011) – $23 million opening, $52 million overall domestic gross
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days (2012) – $14 million opening, $49 million overall domestic gross
Pretty decent numbers for the 20th Century Fox series, but you can see its stateside hauls decreased with each picture. The five-year gap won’t help, as many of the kids who flocked to see the first three are older now.
I’ll predict this opens to a sub double digits gross and likely ends up as the lowest grosser of the franchise thus far.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul opening weekend prediction: $8.1 million
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