Weekend Box Office

It was a quiet weekend at the box office with both new wide releases (horror film Gretel and Hansel and revenge thriller The Rhythm Section) opening softly, apart from a few noteworthy monetary marks for indie films...

Weekend Box Office January 31st through February 2nd (ESTIMATES) 🔺 = new or expanding / ★ = recommended
WIDE RELEASE (800+ screens)	PLATFORM TITLES
"Gretel and Hansel"	Oscar Nominated Short Film "Hair Love"
1 BAD BOYS FOR LIFE  $17.6 (cum. $148)	1 🔺 OSCAR NOMINATED SHORT FILMS $1.0 on 460  screens *NEW* THE CHARTS ★
2 1917  $9.6 (cum. $119.2) THE ACTING,  CONTINUOUS SHOT ★	2 THE LAST FULL MEASURE $519k on 617 screens (cum. $2.0)
3 DOLITTLE $7.7 (cum. $55.2) THIS ODD FRANCHISE	3 WEATHERING WITH YOU $405k on 224 screens (cum. $7.2) REVIEW  ★

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Review: Weathering with You

By Tim

Makoto Shinkai, the Japanese animation director whose new film Weathering with You opens this weekend in the US, has honed in on a few particular aesthetic preoccupations with laserlike intensity over the years. One of these is rain and the way that each droplet catches and reflects the diffuse light of a cloudy day; one is the brilliance of sunbeams piercing their way into shady areas, with fuzzy, dusty edges blurring the difference between light and dark; one is the way that riding in trains forces a lateral flatness onto the perception of the rider, transforming landscapes into planes of action moving across each other. He also favors stories about the extreme emotional states of teenagers, starting with but not limited to youthful romantic passion, and these stories tend to end in lopsided sentimentality expressed with as much unsatisfying contrivance as a decent filmmaker would dare throw into an otherwise satisfying screenplay.

Weathering with You, comes with a scenario that has been created with the apparent goal of specifically enabling him to chase every one of those things as far as a person possibly could. It's about a near-future Tokyo where it's always raining, and a teen girl who has the ability to create localized pockets of rainless sunshine...

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It's a very tight race for this year's Annie Awards

by Nathaniel R

Oops. So much was happening this week we completely neglected the Annie nominations. The ceremony will be held on January 25th. There's no clear frontrunner this year with Missing Link and Frozen 2 tied for the most nominations. Their nearest competitors are not far behind. In other words Klaus, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World , I Lost My Body, and Toy Story 4 were also clearly well liked enough to win big. That's 6 features and when it comes time for the Oscar nominations there can be only 5. We can't discount the possibility that another non-American film besides I Lost My Body might prove a darkhouse spoiler with the Academy's animation branch which has proven open to international films (for nominations if not wins) and isn't always keen on blockbuster sequels.  We should also keep a close eye on Japan's International Feature Oscar submission Weathering With You which got some love here at the Annies, too.

The complete list of nominations and a few comments after the jump...

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32 films competing for nominations in Best Animated Feature

by Nathaniel R

Frozen 2 is clearly hoping to be the first animated franchise to win the Animated Feature category twice.

The Oscar race is officially on for Best Animated Feature. 32 films are planning to compete, which is easily a record as there are usually closer to 22 or so, so we'll definitely have 5 nominees again this year. But the question is which. We've divvied the 32 films up into types to make this easier to process...

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