'Gravity' holds strong amid weak box office

To no one’s very great surprise - albeit to much industry excitement - Gravity completed another successful box-office orbit this past weekend. With yet another $30 million haul, the intergalactic thriller has now earned over $170 million in domestic sales.  At 28%, its fiscal drop was a little steeper this weekend (compared with last weekend’s dip of 23%), but at this point in the film’s wildly successful run, focusing on five percentage points is akin to splitting hairs.

Furthering the déjà vu nature of today’s roundup, Captain Phillips again clocked in at No. 2. Tom Hanks’ suspense tale suffered from a larger slip in sales than Gravity did during its sophomore outing: Down 33%, to gross $17.3 million. In all, the Paul-Greengrass directed, modern day-pirate touting, Oscar-chasing Phillips has earned $53.3 million.

Unfortunately, it seems the rest of the domestic box office offered little audience incentive. Even with Halloween right around the corner, the lone horror feature, Carrie, proved itself unable to scare up business. The film didn’t perform nearly as poorly as the worst of the box-office naysayers had predicted Friday morning, though neither did it justify those optimists who thought (wished?) it could compete with Gravity. Instead, Carrie made an all right $17 million. Compared with Gravity, which skews slightly male, and Phillips, which draws an older crowd, those viewers who did see Carrie were mostly female (54%) and under the age of 25 (56%). Maybe it’ll fare better when it streams on Netflix?

Rounding out the top five (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 took the No. 4 slot with another solid weekend, earning $10 million to boost its overall gross to $93.1 million) Escape Plan earned roughly $9.8 million. The mostly male audience (66%) was also mostly over the age of 30, neatly aligning the Stallone/Schwarzenegger vehicle with this weekend’s theme of “to no one’s great surprise.”

Well, almost no one. Even given The Fifth Estate’s middling reviews, fans of Benedict Cumberbatch may not have expected the film to fare quite as poorly as it did. Apparently, American audiences found little of interest in the Julian Assange/WikiLeaks feature. The Fifth Estate raked in just $1.5 million, earning the lowest gross of any film that opened in over 1,500 theatres this year.

Thankfully for Cumberbatch, his other movie out this weekend, 12 Years A Slave, managed to exceed expectations. On Friday we speculated the film might make $30,000 or so at each of its 19 locations. This morning we learned Steve McQueen’s latest, acclaimed feature averaged $50,000 per theatre. Its total weekend haul amounts to $960,000, a wonderful start for an art-house flick. Fox Searchlight will screen the film in 100 more theatres this coming weekend.

Fellow critical darling All Is Lost may end up competing with Slave at the Academy Awards, but it proved itself a weak opponent at the box office. Robert Redford’s one-man drama took in just $97,400.

To pull the camera out, so to speak, and take a wider view of this weekend’s earnings: Those films that made up the top 12 earned a total of $96.4 million. Even given the endurance of Gravity’s run, that number still signals a 20% drop in earnings from this time last year. Let’s see if this coming weekend can improve October’s outlook.

High hopes for 'Carrie' still fall short of 'Gravity'

For the third week in a row, we feel compelled to frame our box-office speculations using the rhetoric of comparison. How will this weekend’s movies fare… in relation to Gravity? Does Carrie have what it takes to topple the thriller from its tall, tall pedestal? Or will Captain Phillips prove its real-life tenacity and inch ahead into the No. 1 slot? Perhaps Escape Plan will find unexpected power in the pull of nostalgia, and ride dark-horse success past Alfonso Cuaron’s 3D stunner? Will audiences line up for yet another man-against-the-odds survival tale, and help Robert Redford’s All is Lost reign supreme?

Can anyone out-gross Gravity?

Unlikely.

Pundits have predicted a $30 million haul for director Cuaron’s box-office king. As of Wednesday, the film had earned $204 million internationally. Some are speculating Gravity will hit the $300 million mark by weekend’s end.

Though backed by a strong marketing campaign (including this hilarious video), Carrie has received a chilly critical reception. The horror remake and Steven King adaptation is currently tracking 47% rotten on Rotten Tomatoes.  Opinions on the movie’s likely success – or failure – are mixed: Some see the film earning a figure that falls somewhere in the mid-teens, others the low 20s, and a few optimists (they just want to see the Gravity tyrant tumble!) are predicting Carrie could pull in as much as $30 million.

In its second weekend out of the gate, Captain Phillips will most likely land somewhere in the high teens, suffering from a less-than-catastrophic drop of just 25% (Gravity dipped 23% its sophomore weekend). Tom Hanks’ enjoyable tale of human fortitude had, as of October 16, earned $34 million.

Robert Redford is looking to give Hanks a run for his considerable money with his own Oscar-bait vehicle, All is Lost, opening tonight. While the suspense feature isn’t expected to match Phillips’ gross, Redford’s turn as a lone yachter lost at sea has fellow Best Actor nominee scrawled all over it. 

Speaking of leading men with more than their fair share of talent, Benedict Cumberbatch may be one of the industry’s hottest up-and-coming stars to land increasingly serious, high-brow roles, but his The Fifth Estate is unlikely to add to his caché. A biopic/thriller about Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks, Estate has been called (by our critic, Daniel Eagan) “trumped-up Hollywood hokum.” Audiences are expected to react accordingly – by staying away.  Most likely, The Fifth Estate will clock in around $5 come Monday morning.

Opening in limited release to much buzz among specialty circles/Fassbender cults, 12 Years A Slave (also co-starring Cumberbatch) is expected to do great art-house business: around $30,000 per location. Nineteen theaters will play the slavery feature, which, though difficult to watch, is reportedly yet another artistic achievement for director Steve McQueen, whose slim albeit impressive oeuvre includes Hunger and Shame.


Is there a graceful way to transition from the realities of our brutal national history to… Stallone? Nonetheless, the Rocky writer and sexagenarian action star also has a new film opening this weekend, co-starring fellow golden oldie, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in which the two plot their escape from a maximum-security prison. To small surprise, Eagan called Escape Plan “a guilty pleasure,” or rather, “the movie equivalent of junk food.” Odds are, Plan will pull in around $10 million.

In sum: It’s still very much Gravity’s game.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays Wikileaks founder in 'The Fifth Estate'

Many know Benedict Cumberbatch from his role in BBC's "Sherlock Holmes" (watch it on Netflix!) and his villainous roles in Stark Trek Into Darkness and as the necromancer in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Now he's playing Julian Assange in The Fifth Estate, the trailer for which just hit the Internet. Is Julian Assange a hero, or a villain? That appears to be just one question on which those affected by Assange's site Wikileaks differ.

The DreamWorks/Touchstone release, which joins a host of prestige movies coming out this fall, tries hard to make it seem like Wikileaks changed the world, but I can't say I'm 100% sure it succeeds. As of today, an upbeat ending is far from assured. Assange is holed up in Ecuador's embassy in London, while one of the leakers on his site, Bradley Manning, is facing 90 years in prison for what he did. This story is extremely close to the current events it covers, and until I see the finished product, it's hard to know if this will work for or against the movie. Check out the trailer for the movie, which comes out October 18, below. Cast also includes Stanley Tucci, and Bill Condon (Kinsey, Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 & 2, Dreamgirls) directs.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley cast in 'The Imitation Game'

Anyone who grew up in the era of The History Channel's old-school, World War II-heavy programming must remember the Enigma, the coding machine that made appearances in a number of the channel's documentaries. The Enigma was a complex typewriter that transmitted coded messages without ever repeating a letter. The British mathematician Alan Turing was key in figuring out the meaning of oft-repeated phrases, like "Heil Hitler!" Even then, it took other breaks, like having Enigma materials seized on a German U-Boat, to help the Allies decode the messages and turn the tide of the war. The Imitation Game, a modestly-budgeted indie, is tackling Turing's life. Post-war, it had a sad end. He was prosecuted in the U.K. for being gay and forced to take female hormones as a form of chemical castration. He committed suicide not long after, in his 40s. This isn't the first time Turing's story has been dramatized. BBC showed "Breaking the Code," a TV movie about Turing, in 1996.

Benedict Cumberbatch, the star of BBC's "Sherlock" and the villain in Star Trek Into Darkness, will play Turing. Keira Knightley, continuing her passion for period work, will play Turning's close companion, a woman who came from a conservative background but supported him through his physical and mental trials. Graham Moore, who wrote the script for the still-gestating adaptation of the nonfiction bestseller The Devil in the White City, will adapt the screenplay from the biography Alan Turning: The Enigma. Morten Tyldum, the director of Headhunters, will helm.

The Hollywood Reporter writes that the budget will be $15 million, which sounds like a sweet spot for a historical, socially aware indie that will try to catch fire with specialty audiences. The project sounds winning because it will combine the thrills of cryptography and wartime spying with a personal story that's particularly tragic to modern sensibilities. I doubt even socially conservative people against gay marriage would support prosecution and chemical castration for being gay. Cumberbatch has one project in pre-production in his schedule, Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak, while Knightley's projects listed on IMDB are all in post-production, so I suspect the project will shoot sometime this year.