"Winter's War" didn't find summer-like grosses

Mirror Mirror on the wall who is the fairest of them all?

Oh, Charlize you're gorg but those beasts in Jungle Book are fairest to moviegoers, who plucked down another $60 million to watch dem pixels. And all those other computer generated animals in Zootopia in their eighth weekend were also still going strong. Maybe you should have dissolved into birds more often? (With a budget north of $100 million, the opening of The Huntsman reminds Hollywood of a fairly obvious lesson: not every hit is meant to morph into a cash cow franchise by sequelizing it.)

TOP FIVE
01 The Jungle Book $60.8 (cum. $191.4)
02 The Huntsman: Winter's War $20 NEW Review
03 Barbershop: The Next Cut $10.8 (cum. $36)
04 Zootopia $6.6 (cum. $316.4) Reviewish
05 The Boss $6 (cum. $49.5) Review

Susan Sarandon in The MeddlerTHE NEW RELEASES
09 Compadres $1.3 on 368 screens
11 A Hologram for the King $1.2 on 401 screens Review
20 Elvis & Nixon $450K on 381 screens Review
38 The Meddler $15K on 4 screens Review
40 Tale of Tales $9K on 2 Screens Review
42 How to Let Go of the World and... $6K on 1 screen
43 Men & Chicken $2K on 2 screens 

Outside the top ten and new release Don Cheadle's Miles Ahead and Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!! risked adding a few hundred screens and took in a good $600K+ each while Sing Street and Green Room inched into a couple dozen more theaters with solid per screen averages. 

What did you see this weekend ?? The extra question mark is in homage to Everybody Wants Some !! for which we've published both negative and positive reviews. I saw it this weekend and was so glad I finally got around to it.

Everybody Wants Some!! Turns The Baseball Jersey Inside Out

Eric previously argued against Everybody Wants Some!! right here. Here's Daniel Crooke with a second opinion....

Nobody lives in the moment like Richard Linklater. Which is remarkable, considering his canny cinematic ability to lounge with a certain slice of society, simultaneously celebrate and circumvent the trappings of self-importance, and extrapolate no less than what one might call the meaning of life. This is not to say that Linklater offers any absolute definitions – or that he’s a sage Second Coming who has all of them – but that he stands alone when it comes to unassumingly examining issues of identity, socialization, and finding the place where one fits in the world. His latest film Everybody Wants Some!! is no exception; in fact, by isolating one group of folks oft regarded as empty-headed and disposable – that of the jock, the bro, whatever you call them when their glistening pecs aren’t in your way – Linklater challenges the viewer to costume change their own preconceptions along with his ensemble as they amble their way through myriad modes of social circles and shooting the shit.

Now, on its face, one can certainly see why these bong-hit beats would preclude certain audience members from even engaging with the characters onscreen, to miss the forest for the trees. Linklater’s films often work as living, breathing Rorschach tests where you only see what you want to see but the marrow of Everybody Wants Some!! is found in the Magic Eye of it all. Blur the edges of the frame. Blend the bro code, social structures, and pronounced personal differences from the brain’s left side and the spontaneous soul-searching, open-ended quests across campus, and embracing of social overlaps from the right and, in the middle, you’ll find what the film’s really about. More after the jump...

Click to read more ...

Review: Everybody Wants Some!!

Eric here, with unhappy thoughts on the new Richard Linklater film. Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!  promises a two-exclamation-point experience, but it unfortunately delivers as more of an ellipsis, in the true Greek meaning of “falling short”.

Now would be the moment in a review where one encapsulates the plot, but hands up on that, because Everybody is plot-free (self-consciously so).  Let’s say it’s structured around a freshman (Blake Jenner) arriving at college three days before classes start in short-shorts (happy 1980!). We follow him through those three days with his baseball-team-cum-frat-brothers in the pursuit of the game and the girls... 

Click to read more ...