This Week In Movie Posters And Box Office, January 29

We've got Sydney Sweeney as a naughty nun, Jake Gyllenhaal as a manscaped Dalton, and Russell Crowe as some kind of crime-solving hobo.

Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the aughts. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.

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Weekend Box Office

I haven’t done a proper box office post-mortem in a few weeks, mostly because I’ve been busy with higher-priority #content. But hey, let’s bring it back, just to see how it goes.

Here’s the weekend top ten, in domestic box office (from Comscore via AwardsRadar):

[Title (studio): $weekend gross (percentage change from last week) - number of theaters]

1. The Beekeeper (Amazon MGM Studios): $7.4M (-13.7%) – 3,337 theaters

2. Mean Girls (Paramount): $7.3M (-37.4%) – 3,544 theaters

3. Wonka (Warner Bros): $5.9M (-12%) – 3,014 theaters

4. Migration (Universal): $5.1M (-5.7%) – 2,970 theaters

5. Anyone But You (Sony): $4.8M (-11.2%) – 2,885 theaters

6. Fighter (Paramount): $3.7M – 662 theaters

7. Poor Things (Disney): $3.0M (+43.1%) – 2,300 theaters

8. American Fiction (Amazon MGM Studios): $2.8M (+65%) – 1,702 theaters

9. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (Warner Bros/DC): $2.8M (-22.9%) – 2,118 theaters

10. Godzilla Minus One (Toho): $2.6M (+275.6%) – 2,051 theaters

The only new release this week was Fighter, an Indian action movie, opening in a relatively small number of theaters. Its $5,656 per-screen average was by far the best of the top 10, with none of the others cracking the $2,000 mark.

You didn’t used to see multiple weeks with virtually no new releases like this, but its also been a while since we saw movies like Poor Things. in its eighth week of release and American Fiction in its seventh, (with Godzilla Minus One in its ninth) continue to climb the charts. I guess people actually see the awards movies if you don’t release a bunch of crap in January? Then again, the entire top ten only made $44 million, which… well, it ain’t great. When a big blockbuster makes $44 million in its opening weekend, that’s usually considered disappointing.

Meanwhile, Aquaman 2, which everyone figured for a flop, has quietly (I guess? everything is quiet now that all the reporters are dead) grossed $412 million worldwide. Which is… pretty good! Sure, the movie mostly sucked, and even Warner seemed like they’d given up on it even before it opened, but it was directed by James Wan, one of the only directors that seem capable of having fun with these things. Good for him. Furious 7 is still the best Fast/Furious movie.

Have we entered a new paradigm where opening weekends are less important and the long view actually matters again? Eh, hard to say just yet, but it seems pretty clear that no one knows anything anymore. It’s actually pretty nice. Yes, I really need to see The Beekeeper.

This Week In Movie Posters

Welcome to the This Week In Movie Posters, the feature in which we go through all the week’s new movie posters and read way too much into them. Blessed are the paid subscribers, as without them, none of this would be possible. All posters via IMPA.

I used to bitch about diagonal horizon lines, mostly because they used to just take a regular portrait and tilt it sideways to create one. That was a lame poster trend. This one is pretty cool though. Splash! Funky horizon lines are great when they’re justified. And extra points for tying it into the title, sorta.

That’s a lot of sunshine-y glow though. That much coral sunset in a poster usually only means one of two things. What are we thinking, YA romance where one of them has a terminal disease, or religious themed?

Let’s go to IMDB:

After she nearly drowns, a young woman unexpectedly falls for the small-town lifeguard who rescued her. Based on the novel by Kate Marchant.

Okay, so it’s a book, and it’s about young romance. I’m definitely not ruling out YA or one of them having a terminal disease. He has a great “small-town lifeguard” face though, doesn’t he? Even just in partial profile, something about that brow ridge just screams “himbo townie.”

Also, “Andrea Bang” is a great porn name. Bet she’s never heard any jokes about that before.

It’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus and she’s got a big ol’ blurry parrot! Julia Louis-Dreyfus strikes me as about the furthest thing you can find from a “kooky bird lady.” Frances McDormand? That’s a kooky bird lady. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, not so much. That means she’s probably doing a big stretch for this role, hence the not smiling. See? She can do drama too!

I would never doubt Julia Louis-Drefus. I’m sure she pulls it off. But an A24 movie and the only movie quote you can get is from Pete Hammond? Sad!

Even with the entire media industry cratering, it’s nice to see that Pete Hammond, a guy whose “reviews” consist of collections of potential pull-quotes loosely connected with transitional phrases, still has a job. You know what they say, ABBF. Always Be Brand Friendly.

It’s a shame that Sydney Sweeney missed out on being in Paul Verhoeven’s naughty nun movie (Bendetta, it rules) but at least someone is trying to make up for that. And of course it was Neon. Neon is like A24 for people who know about A24.

Why do I feel like they shot half of this movie completely in the dark? Two things I wish would go away are Christopher Nolan-style muddy sound mixes and Game of Thrones-style dark-ass cinematography.

The Lost Bigfoot film of Massachusetts? Oh, so New England is trying to steal Bigfoot from us now? Where would he even hide over there, between your puny, deciduous garbage trees? ENJOY YOUR CHANGING LEAVES, SCUM! THE APE MAN BELONGS TO REDWOOD COUNTRY! GO NINERS!

Jk, jk. Sorry about that. I don’t know much about the film, but that’s a very cool poster. Hairy letters, very cool. Wow!

Dune! The first movie converted me so now I’m a big time Dune Daddy. I can’t wait for part two. I’m not sure about this poster though. Is an explosion really the best illustration of Dune? I remember sand, snorkels, spice, a giant fat man being lowered into a vat of goo… Show me the goo vats, cowards!

This looks like maybe they got Dune confused with Oppenheimer. Come to think of it, I could see Timothee Chalamet in an Oppenheimer prequel. Now an even younger Oppenheimer, who fucks more! Call it “Robert” or something.

Ewan McGregor! Clara McGregor! Conor McGregor! We’ve got all the damn McGregors, we’re lousy with ‘em!

Big yellow (orange?) text! Relatives of famous people! That’s how you know we got us an indie movie, baybaaaaay! Gah-lee, look at all that denim! They weren’t kidding about “mesmerizing authenticity.” What a phrase. I love the idea of watching a real salt of the Earth-ass dude dig a post hole and going into a fugue state.

Cool poster though. Great composition, cool color scheme. Someone should actually paint that truck in those colors. That would be badass.

Yes, yes, it’s the poster for Road House. We covered this one last week. They took our Road House, moved it to Florida, and put MMA in it. I don’t love it. Road House should not have realistic martial arts. Road House should have some kind of mystical mumbo jumbo that exists only for movies.

And yet… it’s Jake Gyllenhaal and Doug Liman, how bad could it be?

I think the shaved chest bothers me the most. Dalton is like a monk. Monks don’t manscape, man! They, uh… drink black coffee and smoke cigarettes! That’s why the late eighties ruled, you could invent a chain-smoking, coffee drinking honky-tonk monk and some guy nearly dead from cocaine would greenlight it.

Neither here nor there, but this pose looks like Gyllenhaal is about to make a little circle with his fingers on his knee. And then if you look at it he gets to sock you in the arm.

Hmm… black and white pictures… Anthony Hopkins… WWII… “One Life”… Is this just Schindler’s List if it Schindler’s List had had only one name on it? Schindler’s Short List!

IMDB says:

The story of Sir Nicholas 'Nicky' Winton, a young London broker who, in the months leading up to World War II, rescued Jewish children from the Nazis.

Okay so the British Schindler, then? I don’t know about you, but I feel like we could’ve done the math on “some people called Nicholas Nicky” ourselves without the apostrophes.

Hell yeah. Gimme all the Dune babies, serving lewks and doing the dance of the sand worm. I gotta say though, Timothee Chalamet looks uncannily like my Noni here. I don’t know if he’s about to make the spice flow or serve me some nice tortellini. I’d be okay with either.

I want to see him chase around a bad guy with a wooden pasta spoon. That thing smarts!

Russell Crowe in full Charlie from It’s Always Sunny mode looks kind of awesome to me, I don’t know. I love his little Home Alone beanie too. I like to imagine him wearing little fingerless gloves, drinking stubbies over an oil drum fire.

“Some lies never die. Sleeping Dogs.”

Something feels so uncanny about this tagline/title combination. What do sleeping dogs do? Lie, of course (if you let them). Shouldn’t it be, like, “some dogs never lie?” Sit. Stay. Play dead. Sleeping Dogs.

Okay fine, I don’t have a better alternative but this one is putting a knot in my brain.

I wouldn’t recommend superimposing a guy’s face over a forest in your poster to anyone, but when the title is “THEY CALLED HIM MOSTLY HARMLESS” it’s already done most of the heavy lifting. Mystery man? Murderer? Molester? Count me in, I can’t resist a doc!

I heard they had to use your mom’s butthole as the model for these, just to make sure they got the scale right.

Ricky Stanicky. Different heights guys! With Zac Efron and lady wrestling man. Plus rating of R?? Where I sign up for!

It’s kind of wild that Peter Farrelly is an Oscar winner (for Green Book, but still) who has made some of the most popular movies of all time and he still only gets his name in really tiny letters at the very bottom. Seems unfair. And this cast looks like it was chosen by AI. I’m not necessarily against it.

IMDB says:

When three childhood best friends pull a prank that goes wrong, they invent the imaginary Ricky Stanicky to get them out of trouble. Twenty years later, they still use the nonexistent Ricky as a handy alibi for their immature behavior.

Damn, is Ricky Stanicky gonna go down for insider trading? Maybe he’s a Boeing exec? Anyway, I will probably stream this.

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Mister Organ is Now Streaming on Netflix

I wrote a big profile of David Farrier and his latest movie back in October. One of the drawbacks of covering movies is that you still want to be “first” in your reporting, but that can be of limited value when you’re covering a doc that opens in New York and LA, but the rest of the audience still has to wait like four more months. Anyway, Mister Organ is on Netflix now, so you can go see what the hell we were talking about back then.

The Cliff’s Notes is that it’s a fascinating documentary about possibly the world’s most exhausting man. I was honestly a little worried about even interviewing David, lest Mister Organ see it and decide that I, too was worthy of harassment. So far, it seems, he hasn’t. Unless Mister Organ was the one who figured out how to put black mold in my kitchen, convinced the contractor to leave us with plywood countertops for the last four months, and put a leak in the other side of the house that insurance isn’t going cover. Shit, maybe it was him…

BlueSky Invite Codes

Twitter is still a lot worse since Elon took over and I’m still not convinced that BlueSky is the replacement, but there’s no reason not to share my invite codes, I suppose. Here ya go. First come first served.

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Until next time, folks. (Next time I think of something to send you, that is). God bless all of the paid subscribers.