Movies

Two from Magnolia Pictures, the story of an iconic record album design firm back and a sighting of Brian Cox usher in a specialty weekend with smoke clearing over New York City. Acrid plumes from Canadian wildfires have smothered the key arthouse market over the past few days in an unusual air quality event that

Five-time Emmy winner and Grammy Award nominee Wayne Brady will play the title character in The Wiz revival when it lands on Broadway in spring 2024, producers announced today, with Doom Patrol’s Alan Mingo Jr. (Kinky Boots) taking the role during many of the production’s pre-Broadway tour dates. The casting comes after the recent news

Six weeks into the writers strike, the early returns on summer studio films have been some of the best since Covid brought the exhibition business to a screeching halt. But if SAG-AFTRA members trade lines of dialogue for picket lines beginning July 1, the business might well look like pandemic redux. The domestic box office

In the wake of world premiering in Cannes to lackluster film reviews at 50% Rotten, Disney/Lucasfilm’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is currently looking at a $60M+ domestic opening. The movie opens on June 30 heading into what is conceivably a five-day play period given that Independence Day falls on a Tuesday. Dial

Broadway box office was down 6% last week – the second week of the 2023-24 season – with even some Tony-nominated productions taking noticeable hits. Camelot, New York, New York, Life of Pi, Fat Ham, Parade, Prima Facie and Shucked were among the productions reporting at least some box office slippage. In all, the 34

Despite all the noise The Flash star Ezra Miller created off set in the last year including a burglary charge for stealing liquor from a neighbor’s house in Vermont, among myriad other tabloid headlines, filmmakers who’ve worked with the actor vouch they’re the consummate professional with zero melodrama on set. Daliland filmmaker Mary Harron told

Summer’s tentpole rumble continues this weekend with Paramount’s seventh Transformers movie, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, which is heat-seeking $155 million at the worldwide box office for its opening frame, $100M of that offshore. The movie reps a concentrated reboot by the studio of the long-in-tooth robots-in-disguise franchise, which has suffered in latter installments from

After the massive weekend success of Sony Animation’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, many rival studios are looking at executing their comic book IP differently on the big screen. Quite often, animated superhero projects are released directly to the home (think Warner Bros-DC’s myriad superhero toon movies like 2010’s Superman/Shazam!: The Return of Black Adam and

D. Barry Reardon, former longtime Warner Bros. President of Sales and Distribution, has died at 92. The exec known as “The Dean of Distribution” among industry peers and filmmakers passed May 27 in Vero Beach, FL. Reardon was the head of theatrical distribution at Warner Bros from 1978-99, and was known for breaking the mold

Celine Song’s Past Lives from A24 is very much here and now, grossing $232k on four screens for over $58k per location, a nice number for Song’s debut film as the second-biggest limited opening of the year so far. A24 also had the highest in April with Beau Is Afraid at $80k per theater at

Broadway box office overall held steady last week, even as the recent Tony Award nominations already seemed to lose some of their power to boost ticket sales. Some shows with nominations saw declines at the box office, from Good Night, Oscar and Some Like It Hot to Leopoldstadt and New York, New York. For the

Columbia Pictures’ and Sony Pictures Animation’s Spider-Man: Across the Universe is casting its web in international box office markets with  $13.5M through Thursday. That’s 2.5x the original in like-for-likes.  Notable in early reporting, India broke the local all-time opening day record for an animated movie with $610K while releasing on a non-traditional Thursday. The launch day gross is higher than

EXCLUSIVE: We hear that the George Clooney directed MGM title, The Boys in the Boat, is set to hit theaters on Monday, Dec. 25, as a wide release. The studio, I understand, were ecstatic over the test scores and landed on the pic’s release date in an effort to grab families. Pic is based on

A24 follows You Hurt My Feelings last weekend with dual-language romance Past Lives, starting a platform release on four screens in New York and LA including Q&As led by talent who have been champions of the film, including Steve Buscemi, Jodie Turner-Smith and Lulu Wang. Expanding this month. The Sundance premiering pic by Celine Song,

EXCLUSIVE: Sony Animation’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is doing some serious business tonight according to box office sources, accumulating $16M off previews that began at 3PM at 3,562 theaters. That’s the second best preview night ever for an animated movie after Disney/Pixar’s Incredibles 2 ($18.5M) from June 2018. Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story 4, with $12M, is

Tyne Daly and Liev Schreiber will star in a new Broadway production next February of John Patrick Shanley’s Tony Award & Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt: A Parable, with direction by Scott Ellis. The Roundabout Theatre Company production will begin performances in February 2024 at the American Airlines Theatre. Exact dates, remaining cast members, and design

Julie Benko, who has built a devoted following as the Funny Girl understudy and alternate Fanny Brice, will originate her first Broadway role this fall in the new musical Harmony by by Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman. Benko will play the role of Ruth, producers Ken Davenport, Sandi Moran and Garry Kief announced today. The

In a rare situation for a Disney tentpole, particularly a live-action title based on a treasured classic animated musical, The Little Mermaid looks to bank more at the domestic box office ultimately than overseas, with $300M-$350M U.S./Canada to $260M abroad. At that level, per finance sources, off a reported $250M production cost and $140M global

Last night at the world premiere of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse there was a huge sigh of relief from the mass of animators inside Westwood’s Regency Village Theater: the $100M budgeted sequel to the Oscar winning animated movie, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, was done; having completed post-production literally just ten days ago after a five-year

Several times in recent years, Sony has used the Cannes Film Festival to promote a key upcoming title, despite the movies not officially being involved in the event — see Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation in 2018, 2017’s The Emoji Movie and 2016’s The Angry Birds Movie.  This year, the marketing team pulled out the

EXCLUSIVE: The Will Rogers Motion Picture Pioneers Foundation has created the Erik Lomis Leadership Award, which will be bestowed at the charity’s 30th Annual Film Row Charity Golf Classic. Modeled after the Payne Stewart Award given annually by the PGA Tour, which is given to a player whose values align with the character, charity, and

Talk about legs — or, more appropriately, wings: Paramount/Skydance’s Top Gun: Maverick is still playing in Japanese cinemas a full year on from its debut. Continuing on from a stratospheric and super-leggy run, the sequel, on its 365th day of release, became Tom Cruise’s biggest film ever in the market. In doing so, it overtook

Refresh for latest…: Disney’s live-action take on The Little Mermaid is doing swimmingly at the domestic box office, with a three-day opening of $95.5M and a four-day projection of $117.5M. Factoring in the international box office bow of $68.3M, that makes for an estimated $163.8M global debut through Sunday. The offshore launch is lower than

Refresh for latest…: Apart from big new opener The Little Mermaid, which we detailed here, this weekend was notable for propelling Universal’s Fast X past the $500M mark globally, and Disney/Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 to over $730M worldwide. The Fast & Furious franchise had, earlier this week, crossed $7B globally while the

A24’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus-starrer You Hurt My Feelings will top an estimated $1.7 million in limited nationwide release for the four-day holiday weekend, at the high end of expectations on 912 screens. That puts it at no. 8 at a domestic box office where Little Mermaid is making all the waves. Breakdown: Friday – $474k; Sat.

EXCLUSIVE, late Thursday PM: Sources are telling us that Disney’s Rob Marshall directed The Little Mermaid is singing some high notes tonight of $10M+ in previews. Should that figure exceed $10.8M it will rep the 6th highest preview performance among PG and G rated titles in motion picture history. Tracking pegged the Halle Bailey movie

“It was a contributor to the specialty box office, and I hope it will be again,” says Laemmle CEO Greg Laemmle of MoviePass, the subscription service that unsurprisingly went bankrupt in early 2020 after offering a movie a day for ten bucks a month. A co-founder Stacy Spikes, who was pushed out amid strategic differences

The arthouse box office hasn’t recovered quickly post-Covid, but one of the oases for the sector, even by pre-pandemic benchmarks, has always been a Wes Anderson movie. This summer we have his latest all-star absurdist comedy, Asteroid City, which just premiered at Cannes, which begins its limited run on June 16. How big has Anderson

Universal’s Fast & Furious franchise has reached a new milestone, spinning past $7B at the global box office. Getting there, it becomes the fifth series of films to the mark, doing so with 11 titles. It’s currently the No. 5 franchise of all time, and is tied with Warner Bros’ Wizarding World for the fewest

UK-based global theater chain and parent of Regal Cinemas said overnight it expects to emerge from Chapter 11 in July. The news comes as nearly 100% of its legacy lenders agreed to an amended and restated restructuring agreement and backstop that have been months in the making. There had been some holdouts. The giant exhibitor