This Week In Movie Posters/Box Office Round-Up Oct. 24

'American Fiction' comes in hot with one of the better posters I've seen this year. Plus some other stuff. Whatever, you get it.

Weekend Box Office Round-Up

You know what this weekend was. It was Killers of the Flower Moon weekend! —Which I’ve already reviewed, written up for GQ (specifically Brendan Fraser’s performance), and reposted my interview with the author. Huge weekend! The beginning of awards season!

Yet, as we learn from time to time, movie-head reality is different from regular reality, in which Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour topped the box office with $33 million domestically, and Killers of the Flower Moon ran a distant-ish second, with $23 million domestically. Including the $21 million it made in 63 foreign markets, it was a $44 million global opening for Killers of the Flower Moon. The Irishman basically went direct to Netflix in 2019 so we can’t really compare it, but Scorsese’s last non-doc before that, Silence, barely earned $23 million worldwide in its entire run.

Anyway, $23 million domestically is basically in line with the pre-release tracking estimates, for whatever that’s worth. And most sources note that it was a pretty good opening for a three hour and 26-minute period piece. It also had an A- Cinemascore, which is one of Scorsese’s best (Cinemascore being a great gauge of what your average Tom Tank Top and Suzie Soda Pop think of any given film, which must be taken with a grain of salt on account of most people are morons).

Still, the movie cost $200 million to make before promotion and advertising, and so $23 million doesn’t sound that great to a non-math knower like me.

What do the “experts” think?

Some might wonder how a $200M+ movie before P&A from Apple Original Films, even with a global opening of $44M, might be considered a win here. Quite often, we’d be throwing hatchets at such P&Ls.

“Throwing hatchets?” Is that because… it’s a movie about Native Americans? Maybe not everything needs to be a pun, man. But I digress…

While this might be considered a flop for a motion picture studio, several sources tell me that a tech company Apple doesn’t count it this way. “This is a form of advertising for them to get people to come to their ecosystem; that’s how they see it. They don’t see it as pure profit and loss, in fact, it’s a marketing expense for them,” says one wise film finance executive.

Please, bro, just come to my ecosystem. It’s full of great products, bro, please.

Entertainment for Apple is but a sliver of their prime revenues amid iPads, computers, and iPhones. When it comes to determining the success of a theatrical release from a streamer such as Apple or Amazon, one distribution source tells me “as long as the theatrical rental covers their marketing expense, it’s a job well done.” [Deadline]

Oh sure, tech industry math. I can’t imagine how that could possibly go wrong.*

As much as the movieheads love them, it seems like Scorsese movies are basically loss leaders at this point. And that’s fine! You need movies like that just to keep people who don’t care about the usual hog slop in the habit of going to movies.

It’s hard not to appreciate Scorsese movies getting made, whatever the fuzzy math used to make them. Hell, they raided the sovereign wealth fund of the country of Malaysia to make Wolf of Wall Street. Sucks for the Malaysians, but a pretty great movie, right? I saw it with my mom. Kinda weird.

We should pass a law that stipulates that if a tech company makes a certain amount of profit, they’re required to finance at least one money-losing Martin Scorsese project. For the good of society.

*Slight update to that The Numbers Are All Fake post: Bunker 15, the company I wrote about in it that was paying critics to juice RottenTomatoes scores, actually emailed me last week offering to pay me for some reviews (they didn’t specify for which movies, or stipulate that the reviews would have to be positive). I can’t tell whether they saw the post and are trying to mess with me or if I just popped up onto their radar because I’m a Tomatometer critic. I never responded. Should I?

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.

We begin this week with Napoleon, which looks to be the hottest dad event of the fall (I am PSYCHED). This isn’t the best poster for this one we’ve had, but I still like it. That pose feels very French, doesn’t it? It’s like his beeg Fronsh nose is going to float him along on the scent waft to some lady’s lacy underpants, drying on a windowsill.

Fun fact: in the French version of Looney Tunes, Pepe Le Pew is Italian. Come to think of it, Napoleon is also kind of Italian. What a journey we’ve gone on here today.

Seems kind of ableist to compare noses with a Sphynx, but that’s just me. Reminds me of that old Mitch Hedberg joke about not waving at people you don’t know.

Well looky here, it seems we got us one a them nesting doll situations.

I could look up the plot of this one but I don’t feel like it. Sorry, guys, I need more.

Finally, the real story behind Tyler Perry! He only releases 17 movies per year so I’m glad he’s finally getting a platform for his thoughts.

And here we have Origin, from Ava DuVernay, whose poster isn’t giving us a whole lot beyond “this is an arthouse film!”

Which is cool, I like art, despite what you may have heard.

I don’t entirely know what to make of Ava DuVernay. She made Selma, one of my favorite biopics, and then A Wrinkle In Time, one of the smarmiest movies I can remember. In fact that’s basically all I can remember about it. I’ll do her the honor of actually looking this one up:

The unspoken system that has shaped America and chronicles how lives today are defined by a hierarchy of human divisions. [IMDB]

Huh. Feels like we’re missing a word somewhere in there, no? Gonna need another source on this:

Contrary to early prognostication by pundits, Oscar nominee Ava DuVernay’s film Origin will be competing this awards season as an original screenplay, not an adapted screenplay, The Hollywood Reporter has learned from sources close to the film.

The moving drama, which premiered to acclaim at the Venice and Toronto international film festivals, was inspired by but is not an adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 best-selling book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent.

Indeed, Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize winner for her 2010 book The Warmth of Other Suns, is not featured at all in Caste, but she is the beating heart and soul of Origin, as written by DuVernay, an Oscar nominee for the 2016 documentary feature 13th. Wilkerson is portrayed in Origin by Oscar nominee Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, who received a nod for her role in 2021’s King Richard. [HollywoodReporter]

Sure. I still don’t quite get it, but at least now I’m intrigued. It has Jon Bernthal in it.

Ay, it’s friggin me! I’m Sly Stallone ova heah!

Not a bad poster, and that’s the same general outfit I’ve seen Sly wearing basically every day for the last five years (yes I follow Sly on all the socials). Also the same facial expression. But that’s more because Sly’s face doesn’t really “move” per se these days than a personal choice.

Aaaanyway, I enjoy that this poster presupposes that you saw Rocky 47 years ago and you’ve been wondering what he’s been up to ever since.

Wow, is anyone else getting the sudden urge to watch some porn? I was so busy looking at their tanned half-naked flesh that I didn’t even notice that the names and actors are out of order.

I remember a few years back on FilmDrunk, we had an idea for “F*ckstarter,” which would be like Kickstarter, only the purpose would be to raise enough money to bribe two celebrities to have sex with each other. This movie feels like it began as a F*ckstarter.

Sidenote, did you see the fake Al Jazeera reporter who was outed by being horny for Sydney Sweeney the other day? Classic. Let he who has not been horny for Sydney Sweeney on main cast the first stone and whatnot.

“Every time a bell rings, an angel gets to KILL” might be my new favorite tagline of all time. That is just *chef’s kiss*. He’s stabbing the snow globe! He’s an evil angel!

There are few things I love so much as a movie that just wants to be a movie, you know? This feels like it wants to be the movie-est movie. With this much going on, I don’t think I needed to know that it came from the writer of Freaky at the top.

Also: the town is called “Demon Falls!” You think the people would’ve sense something was up based on the name, but hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

Killers of the Flower Moon is one of those book-to-movie-adaptations where I ended up loving both, which maybe makes it easier to forget that the movie version of a book you loved almost always sucks. I loved The Boys In The Boat (another incredibly dad book) and I’m curious to see how George Clooney handles it. His directorial output has been, shall we say, uneven. Only a couple of them have been true stinkers (Leatherheads, Monuments Men) but you don’t necessarily get the sense that he’s making a lot of artistic choices.

I’ll save you the trouble of looking it up, Jonathan Glazer is the director of Sexy Beast and Under the Skin. I don’t know what this one is going to be about, but it looks eerie and surreal! Screw it, let’s just look it up:

The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his wife Hedwig, strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden next to the camp. [IMDB]

Yep, I am in.

I had forgotten who Rustin was about since we posted the last poster (Bayard Rustin, a gay civil rights hero) but it didn’t really matter because I was in based on Colman Domingo alone. It’s too bad they can’t put someone’s voice on a poster, Colman Domingo could sell me anything.

As we’ve discussed, the best thing an actor can do is look like a cool guy you’d want to hang out with.

This looked like one of those slightly dull uplifting documentaries you see Starbucks promoting, but then I got to the “Philly” part and now I’m sort of intrigued. I’m hoping to hear some good accents and some weird slang, possibly some gratuitous use of the word “jawn.”

You know it’s going to be a good party when someone’s wearing antlers. Antlers are the new lamp shade on the head.

That being said, the light and shadows are doing strange things to Barry Keoghan’s chest here. It looks like he has washboard… pecs? I’m not sure those are a thing.

This new poster for American Fiction is indisputably this week’s best poster. I think the movie is about a fake memoirist or something, but the poster is so cool on its own that it barely even matters. And they used a pullquote that isn’t the usual one word or “adverbly adjective” construction. You love to see it.

So this is a Trolls movie? Who is this stop-motion Minions-looking dude then? What does this have to do with anything? I’m not looking this up, fuck you.

I know I said the American Fiction poster was the best, but this one is pretty cool too. The trailer was doing a lot with the mirror motif (yes, I blogged it), and now the poster seems to follow suit.

“Because of my multiple personality theme, I've chosen the motif of broken mirrors to show my protagonist's fragmented self. Bob says an Image System greatly increases the complexity of an aesthetic emotion.” -Donald Kaufman, Adaptation.

The broken mirror image system here seems a little high falutin’, but “more Barry Keoghan and Richard E. Grant” is never a bad strategy. Justify it however you want, I just want to see the rascals act rascally.

As we’ve discussed, Barry Keoghan is the National Rascal of Ireland. Every country has one. It seems like Richard E. Grant could be the National Rascal of the UK, but apparently he grew up in Swaziland. They might have to pass a special law in Parliament.

Oh hell yes. You can tell this movie is Christian as hell because of all the snowflakes and lens flares. Snowflakes and lens flares are the Christian movie equivalent of sparks in action movie posters. SOOOO MUCH GRRRRAAAAAAACE, OOH WAH-AH AH-AH!

The guy who directed this directed THREE MOVIES this year. I even reviewed one of them for Uproxx before they laid me off. Gotta respect the hustle (of this director, not of Uproxx, in case that was unclear. You do not, under any circumstances, “gotta hand it to them.”)

I love the concept on this Killers of the Flower Moon poster, but I feel like the color scheme makes it a little boring? Seems like it would be better if more vivid. That being said I am a colorblind man so your mileage may vary.

And no, those colorblindness-curing glasses don’t really work, they just make everything look reddish.

Whooooaaaaa looks trippy, brah! Sam Esmail is the creator of Mr. Robot. I was about to say that this is his first feature, but apparently he already directed one, a rom-com with Justin Long, if you can believe it. I wonder what that guy’s doing these days.

Myha’la, incidentally, used to be called Myha’la Herrold. She was in the show Industry, but apparently she’s just Myha’la now. Feels a little presumptuous, doesn’t it? I feel like pop culture tells you when you’ve attained one-name status, not the other way around. But what do I know, I’m just a boring ass dad now. I only get to have opinions on movies with sparks in the poster.

I almost forgot!

I have invite codes for Blusky. I’m not quite on the Blusky bandwagon yet (it still seems a little buggy, and it has nowhere near the footprint of Twitter yet) but if you want to try it out, go for it. First come first served on these I guess:

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