Year in Review: Greatly Abbreviated Box Office Lists and 'What Ifs'

the year in review lists are winding down but not quite yet done!

If you had predicted that Bad Boys 3 would be the biggest grosser of 2020 in January, nobody would have believed you.

We shan't rehash what's happened to movie theaters this past year (everyone knows). But normally at this time we have tons of fun compiling extensive deep-dive lists of how well movies of various genres and types of releases did. And of course we can reflect on how the success impacted their awards chances (Parasite never would have won Best Picture without that incredible theatrical run, becoming the biggest subtitled hit in the US in the past 16 years. Since there was only the first three months of the year with normal box office the lists are VERY strange and in some cases we just couldn't do them. But here's an extremely abbreviated version of what we normally do...

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What did you see this weekend?

Parasite was astonishingly up 16% in its 16th weekend getting its third wind or so now as we approach Oscar night. 1917 has passed the $100 million mark and Little Women is almost there, too, both dropping less than 30% this weekend five weeks into their run. In short: they're all quite popular which is good news for the Oscars coming in early February. 

Weekend Box Office January 17th-20th (ESTIMATES) 🔺 = new or expanding / ★ = recommended
WIDE RELEASE (800+ screens)	PLATFORM TITLES
1 BAD BOYS FOR LIFE  $34 (cum. $120.6)	1 🔺   THE LAST FULL MEASURE $1.0 on 614  screens *NEW*

2 🔺  1917  $15.8 (cum. $103.8) CONTINUOUS SHOT, GLOBE VICTORIES ★	2 WEATHERING WITH YOU $693k on 458 screens (cum. $6.5) REVIEW  ★

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"Bad Boys for Life" and audiences check out those BP nominees

The box office report comes real late this week since it takes a while for the coins to settle after holiday weekends. But here we go with the long weekend estimates (which probably aren't all in).

Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are both in their 50s but there's no aging out of action franchises (as we saw with Hamilton & Schwarzenegger last summer in Terminator Dark Fate). The first Bad Boys arrived in 1995 as an instant smash and its sequel waited until 2003 but audiences haven't fallen out of love in the long gaps. They came back in droves 17 years later for round three.

Since this was the first weekend after the Oscar nominations and most of the Best Picture nominees (re) expanded their screen counts, let's check in with EVERYTHING in wide release... and their counterparts in platforming.

Weekend Box Office January 17th-20th (ESTIMATES) 🔺 = new or expanding / ★ = recommended
WIDE RELEASE (800+ screens)	PLATFORM TITLES
1 🔺  BAD BOYS FOR LIFE  $73.4 *NEW*	1 🔺   WEATHERING WITH YOU $1.7 on 486 screens *NEW* REVIEW  ★

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Posterized: Michael Bay

I can't believe I'm doing this. It feels so perverse. But with the Notorious B.A.Y.'s 10th movie dropping this weekend, why not? Pain and Gain is winning generally favorable pre-release buzz for its dumb brute yuks and for Michael Bay's understanding of his own "gifts". And people are even asking if he's an "auteur"... which, well I called him that really early on because he is. Auteur means "author" so anyone with a clear ownership of their filmography -- where you can see their fingerprints all over their work -- qualifies. It doesn't mean "Great Filmmaker" though that tends to be how people use it.

Besides, I'm genuinely curious if you Film Experiencers have seen his movies. I've often bristled at the notion that movie buffs and cinephiles are elitist snobs. From my personal experience its the multiplex masses who are the true elitists, since they're so unlikely to seek out movies that are outside the mainstream comfort zones. Most "film snobs" I know will see just about anything and can find worth in just about any genre. Have any Michael Bay fans seen a film by Michael Haneke, Jane Campion or Lars von Trier?

Anyway... 

How many of Michael Bay's nine GIANT movies have you seen?

Bad Boys (1995), The Rock (1995), Armageddon (1997)
Remember when you couldn't escape these blockbusters? Actually I escaped them. I only saw Armageddon in theaters from Bay's Noisy Nineties Breakthrough period. Because his films were always on cable at one point I think I have seen sizeable portions of the others.

Pearl Harbor (2001), Bad Boys II (2003), The Island (2005)
Remember when Pearl Harbor had Oscar buzz. Hee!
Remember how profoundly uncool it was of Michael Bay to blame Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson for The Island's box office failure? As if they were to blame for him getting his arguably worst reviews.

Transformers (2007), Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009), Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)
Michael Bay has been directing giant fucking robots (or the green screens where they will eventually be super-imposed) for the past half decade. Now he's got actors again, though he very wisely chose cartoonish ones.

How many of these blockbusters have you seen? I'm surprised to realize that I've seen only 3 in theaters though it feels like I've seen them all from their ubiquity. I do plan to see Pain & Gain. You?