A24’s big bet on Civil War is paying off handsomely as the action thriller is holding on strongly through the weekend to post an opening weekend now projected at $25.7 million, about 12% more than our Friday-morning prediction. Our baseline for this movie, based on the performance of director Alex Garland’s previous films, A24’s record at the box office, and similar recent sci-fi action movies, was $8.8 million. We already knew the film would top that figure going into the weekend, but this is an excellent result for an entirely new film about a controversial subject.
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Our model thinks Civil War has a very slight edge over Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire going into what will be an interesting weekend at the box office. Alex Garland’s controversial action thriller will give the director his best opening weekend, beating Annihilation’s $11.1-million debut in 2018. Something over $20 million looks likely, but whether it can beat Kong remains to be seen.
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The long wait is finally over for followers of the Grantham family, as Downton Abbey: A New Era arrives in movie theaters in North America this weekend. The film was originally scheduled for global release in December of last year before moving to its current berth, and that should have helped its box office prospects, even if it was never expected to match the $31-million debut of the first movie in the franchise. Based on the current market conditions, and its performance from Thursday-evening previews, a weekend in the mid to high teens looks likely.
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Black Panther was never in danger of losing its place at the top of the box office chart this weekend, after a $202 million opening, but its job will be a little easier for not having a new release playing in close to the same number of theaters. That said, Game Night is obviously winning over some theater chains, as it will debut in a very solid 3,488 locations this weekend. There haven’t been many films like this opening in over 3,000 theaters in February in recent years, and the most recent comparable release is probably 2011’s Just Go With It, which launched in 3,548 theaters and made a shade over $30 million for the weekend.
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2018 got off to a good start and January more or less held its ground when compared to 2017. There were some misses, but surprise holdovers made up the difference. Looking forward, February will be dominated by Black Panther. In fact, it will very likely make more during its opening weekend than the second place film, Fifty Shades Freed, will likely make in total. Black Panther likely won’t break records, but it could come close, while Fifty Shade Freed and Peter Rabbit both have a 50/50 shot at $100 million. Last February, The Lego Batman Movie both earned $175 million, while Fifty Shades Darker earned over $100 million. Black Panther will easily beat any film from last February; in fact, it could earn more than the top two films earned combined. As long as the rest of the box office isn’t a complete disaster, February should help 2018 earn a significant edge over 2017 in the year-over-year comparisons.
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It’s Oscar day and, if all goes to plan, I will be live-blogging the ceremony tonight. Here is the list of nominees marked according to predictions from our readers, and my personal wishes. Nominees in Bold are the ones predicted to win by our readers (we’ll have a full rundown of the predictions at noon, after the contest ends). If I am predicting a different film, those are in Italics. Meanwhile, the nominees I want to win, but don’t think will win, are Underlined. There are a few categories where the film I really think deserves the award was not even nominated, plus a few I don’t have a real opinion on.
With our annual Oscar Prediction contest underway, now is the best time to look at the nominees and try and figure out who the favorites are and which films should just feel honored to be nominated. The Best Original Screenplay category isn't the most lop-sided category we will highlight, but it is also not very competitive.
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The Oscar nominations were announced at 5:30 am Pacific time. Nothing is good that early in the morning. Worse still, this was a terrible year for snubs, especially when it comes to diversity of the nominees. The voters for the Oscars are 94% white and 77% male... but that's still more diverse than the list of nominees. The Revenant led the way with 12 nominations and it is expected to win a few of those, while it is a serious contender in most of the categories it was nominated in.
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The Directors Guild of America spread out the nominations, which I always felt hurt the buzz. There are ten categories of awards, but only three of which pertain to theatrical releases. There are very few surprises across these three categories, so the Oscar nominations today shouldn't be full of surprises either.
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The BAFTA nominations were announced and you can read them on their site... in alphabetical order. Alphabetical order is very useful in most circumstances, but not here. On the other hand, the nominees within each category are not presented in alphabetical order. ... Are the BAFTAs trolling us? As for the actual nominees, the big winners here are Bridge of Spies and Carol, both of which earned nine nominations. For Carol, this is just another impressive score, but this was a pleasant surprise for Bridge of Spies.
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Ex Machina is a high-concept Sci-fi movie that I thought had a chance to do well in limited release. ... It earned just over $25 million in theaters and is currently one of the biggest limited release hits of the year. The fact that it found an audience is excellent. Did it deserve this success? And does the DVD / Blu-ray live up to its theatrical success?
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