Box Office: Beatriz at Dinner with Giant F***ing Robots

By Nathaniel R

The opening weekend for Transformers: The Last Knight was such a huge drop from the series past bows that they might want to use the last film's title The Age of Extinction rather than dumping more billions into keeping this franchise alive. Unless of course its overseas take continues to be ginormous. 

Weekend Box Office (June 23rd-25th)
W I D E	L I M I T E D
1. 🔺 TRANSFORMERS (5) $45.3 (cum. $69) NEW	1. 🔺 BEATRIZ AT DINNER $1.8 (cum. $3) 491 screens
2. CARS 3 $25.1 (cum. $99.8)	2.  PARIS CAN WAIT $612k (cum. $4.1)
3.  WONDER WOMAN $25.1 (cum. $318.3) Review | Top Ten |  Special	3. 🔺 THE BIG SICK $435k NEW 5 theaters
4. 🔺 47 METERS DOWN $7.4 (cum. $24.2)	4. 🔺 THE BEGUILED $240k NEW 4 theaters Sofia's Filmography | Cannes Bow
5. ALL EYEZ ON ME $5.8 (cum. $38.6)	5.  MY COUSIN RACHEL $200k (cum. $2.4) 163 screens On the 1952 version
6. THE MUMMY  $5.8 (cum. $68.5)	6. 🔺 THE EXCEPTION $138k (cum. $250) 48 screens  REVIEW
7. PIRATES (5) $5.2 (cum. $160)	7.🔺  MAUDIE $83k (cum. $???) 28 screens  REVIEW
8. ROUGH NIGHT $4.7 (cum. $16.6) Reviewish	8. 🔺  THE BAD BATCH $91k NEW 30 screens REVIEW
9. CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS $4.2 (cum. $65.7)	9. CHURCHILL $70k (cum. $1.1) 55 screens
10. GUARDIANS VOL. 2 $3 (cum. $380.2)  REVIEW	10. THE WEDDING PLAN $31k (cum. $1.3) 34 screens
🔺 = new or added screens numbers from box office mojo

In other box office news: Wonder Woman continues to show great legs... and before anyone calls us out for sexism, please know that that's common box office vernacular for insignificant percentage drops from week to week meaning the audience is really into you. This often happens with sleeper hits indicating that word of mouth is keeping them buzzing but it's much much rarer with films that open as big as Wonder Woman did. In fact, it's holding so well that it will beat the domestic grosses of DC stablemates Suicide Squad and Batman v Superman any day now which means only The Dark Knight films will have performed better for Warner Bros's DC family. 

In limited release Beatriz at Dinner starring Salma Hayek added 400+ screens to its tiny number and is performing quite well. Paris Can Wait, meanwhile has quietly made over $4 million now  -- impressive. The Big Sick, the new romantic comedy starring and written by Kumail Nanjiani, had the best weekend, though. Its reviews are spectacular and it now has the highest per screen average for any opener this year, taking in nearly half a million on just 5 screens. In a very crowded weekend for platforming films, the audience also showed some interest in The Beguiled but not much at all in The Bad Batch.

What did you see this weekend? 

Chappie, or "God, How I Hated That Robot"

Michael C here. The more coarse and petty the level of online discourse becomes the more determined I am to elevate things when I add my own voice to the mix. And yet, here I am sitting down to write about Chappie, a film that announces itself as being full of Big Ideas, and all I really want to say is, “God, how I hated that robot.” 

I could couch that in more academic terms. I could say Chappie’s grating personality exemplifies the many drastic miscalculations Neill Blomkamp made in crafting his latest sci-fi parable. But let’s cut to the heart of the matter. Chappie is the worst. Not Chappie the movie, which is bad, but not as Earth-shatteringly terrible as its buzz suggests. Chappie the character, the first robot to be programmed with a soul. I hated Chappie’s cloying, chirpy voice (courtesy of District 9's Sharlto Copley). I hated the supposedly cutesy-poo way Chappie refers to himself in the third person. I hated the attempts to make me go “Awww” by having Chappie relate to the children’s book The Black Sheep. And Sweet Jesus did I hate it when a gang of thugs teaches Chappie to mimic all their irritating mannerisms. [More...]

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Box Office: The Studios Fail America on the 4th of July

Amir here with the weekend’s box office report. ‘twas quite a sad one at the multiplex; Positive adjectives were hard to come by. Tran4mers topped the charts again, but even that franchise has tired its audience so much that it now lags significantly behind the previous installments. Tammy came in second, but this one is also way behind last year’s Melissa McCarthy vehicles like The Heat. Maybe people are finally realising that having a superstar who doesn't fit Hollywood's notions of traditional beauty is completely different from having a superstar who doesn't fit Hollywood's notions of traditional beauty solely to make fat jokes about her.

 

Deliver Us From Evil was a big flop, this one falling behind director Scott Derrickson’s previous films, despite finding some major champions among critics. And if those are not enough underachievers for one week, there was also Earth to Echo, not just beating Deliver Us... as the weekend’s most awkwardly titled offering, but also beating it on the disappointment scale. This was the only new family option of the weekend, but it finished behind the leftover How to Train Your Dragon 2, which is another massive disappointment in its own right.

WEEKEND BOX OFFICE
01 TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION $36.4 (cum. $174.7)
02 TAMMY $21.1 NEW (cum. $32.9) Review
03 DELIVER US FROM EVIL $9.5 (cum. $15)
04 22 JUMP STREET $9.4 (cum. $158.8) Podcast
05 HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2 $8.7 (cum. $140) best movie dragons
06 EARTH TO ECHO $8.2 NEW (cum. $13.5) 
07 MALEFICENT $6.1 (cum. $213.8) Podcast
08 JERSEY BOYS $5.1 (cum. $36.7) Review
09 THINK LIKE A MAN TOO $4.9 (cum. $57.1)
10 EDGE OF TOMORROW $3.6 (cum. $90.8) Capsule / Top Ten Thus Far

Perhaps Begin Again and Snowpiercer could have emitted some positive vibes with their relatively strong expansions, but no, hang on a minute! Dinesh D’Souza’s America – a sequel to Obama’s America? Oh, who cares anyway? It’s not like that first film made any damn sense – beat both of them to finish just outside the top ten. Yes, Dinesh D’Souza! Enough has been written about the hypocrisy and sheer stupidity of this man to make one think that a multimillion dollar opening and an A-Fucking-Plus Cinemascore is out of reach for his films, but no. It’s still possible. America has disappointed us all. The silver lining is that he, too, is lagging far behind his previous film.

What did you watch this weekend? Please give us some positive vibes to counteract Hollywood's failure to schedule anything worthwhile on such a big moviegoing weekend.

See Also: Nathaniel's Top Ten at the Halfway Mark

Tim's Toons: Remembering the Best of All Transformers Movies

Tim here. We are come to the release weekend of a new Transformers movie - this one has Mark Wahlberg replacing Shia LaBeouf and robot dinosaurs replacing the idiotically absurd lack of robot dinosaurs. And with solemn redundancy almost as predictable as the content of the movies themselves, the same critical conversations that happen every time a Transformers opens are happening once more. There's the "if you like these movies, you are objectively wrong" essay; the litany of reviews all bemoaning the length, noise, and visual incoherence of Michael Bay's latest bombardment of ugly CGI and sexism; the handful of weakly noble defenses that it's all actually fun, and don't we like having fun? And I largely agree with at least two of these, and always enjoy when they put in their appearance.

Then there are always the pieces about how the Bay movies are cynical, loud junk that entirely miss the goofy fun of the crudely-animated Japanese cartoon from 1986 that first brought the Transformers to the big screen. And since I wasn't doing this when the last movie opened, it's my pleasure to write about that one this time around.

For Transformers: The Movie (or, formally speaking, The Transformers: The Movie, but that’s a lot of definite articles in just four words) is actually pretty good, considering how crappy it is. [More...] 

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22 Link Street

VF Wyatt Russell, son of Kurt & Goldie, on his 22 Jump Street experience
Digital Spy Mark Ruffalo talks the future of the Hulk. Solo movie, Avengers, so on. (BTW and unrelated: did you see Mark Ruffalo riding a unicycle on Graham Norton?)
MNPP wonders wtf Jude Law is wearing
/Film "40 things I learned on the set of Transformers: Age of Extinction"

Film Doctor has 10 notes on 22 Jump Street
Gothamist recommends 5 drive-in movie theaters near NYC. Holy hell. I didn't realize any were left nearby. I am so going. If uh... well, I don't have a car because I live in NYC. Never mind.
Pajiba an open letter to a kid at the theater watching How To Train Your Dragon 2 (spoiler heavy)
Empire whoops. Just days after that awful teaser, Paddington has lost his voice as Colin Firth exits
The Blot Michael Musto names his 10 greatest female movie stars of all time with the most recent addition being Cate Blanchett. A couple of strange choices. Of note: His three way tie (Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland -I can't see what connects them) features three indisputables but that makes it a top 12

WTF?ness
Hollywood.com posted a list of 20 remakes that prove "original isn't always better" -- is it a prank that The Stepford Wives (2004) begins the otherwise kinda okay no wait kind of respectable but  random no wait insane list?

A Forever Must Read
"How to Deal With Criticism" - this piece from The Toast made me laugh so so much - the cave story is just. gah! -- and was also so inspiring. I've done some of these self-sabotage things. Listen, nobody is ever going to love everything you do. But you gotta do you. Chin up. Back to work.