Tranny Tackles the Cinema: The Films of 2/24

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Breaking news: The Marvel Machine is still chugging along just fine.

Despite all of the hubbub about its comparatively poor reviews/exit polling and shoddy VFX work, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania still managed to easily set a new record for the Paul Rudd-led franchise with a $106.1 mil debut and record the third best President's Day Weekend performance in history (Black Panther and Deadpool hold the top two). The true test of its meddle will come it this weekend, but considering its day-to-day drops were all less than other recent not overly well received titles Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder and Eternals, it may end up hold better than expected.

While Quantumania rocketed all the way to the top spot, Jim Cameron and Boosh's new nemesis Puss in Boots continued their reign over the holdover market by adding another $6.5 and $5.3 respectively. After 2+ months of business, Avatar is sitting pretty with $657.5 mil and Puss in Boots-which just entered the top 10 grossing movies in released 2022-has made $166.1 mil. Pretty damn good for sequels to 10+ year old movies.

Rounding out the top 10 was last week's box office champion Magic Mike's Last Dance ($5.4 mil)-which limited its drop to just under 35% by adding 1,500+ theaters to its total in weekend #2 and Knock at the Cabin ($4 mil)-which followed Old's pattern of a brutal second weekend drop followed by a nice third weekend hold. Barring a surprise bomb among the new wide releases or steeper-than-expected drop by those resilient December releases, this will likely be the last appearance in the top 5 for both of these films.

On the limited front, Return to Seoul outdueled Emily for the PTA crown-by taking home $13,657 in 2 theaters over the former's $8,057 in 5. Emily is expanding nationwide on Thursday night, so expect Return to Seoul to continue to be the darling of the specialty scene once again this week.

Elsewhere, Focus continued their puzzling practice of throwing a well-reviewed indie title into a couple hundred theaters right away with the Australian queer coming-of-age romance Of an Age-which unsurprisingly mustered an average $1,270 per theater. Would Of an Age done great business with a slower rollout? Probably not, but not even allowing it a chance to find an audience through a slow rollout isn't a good business practice for Universal.


Wide Releases:
The last time Elizabeth Banks got behind the camera, she made a reboot that got very little fanfare and made even less money at the box office. Her next move as a filmmaker had to be wisely calculated or otherwise she might not get another crack at directing. Well, Banks certainly didn't play it safe when selecting this crucial directorial effort as she took a gig from her old friends Phil Lord and Chris Miller to helm Cocaine Bear (Universal).

As the title insinuates, this film uses a wild true story of a black bear who died after ingesting hundreds of pounds cocaine that a drug smuggler dropped from an airplane into a Georgia forest in December 1985 as the inspiration to make a darkly comedic creature feature/alternate history piece where the bear doesn't only survive after eating all that coke, it turns into a hostile killing machine that goes after an assorted cast of characters (Keri Russell, Alden Ehrenereich, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Margo Martindale, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and the late Ray Liotta in his final complete role are among these people) that happen to find themselves in the forest on that fateful day.

Following in the footsteps of Universal's other recent genre releases Violent Night and M3GAN, Cocaine Bear's marketing has firmly established that it's a self-aware film that is fully embracing the absurdity of its premise. If you buy a ticket to Cocaine Bear, you know that the bear will eat the coke, the bear will kill people while high on coke and its R-rating will be earned over the course of its 95-minute runtime. The simple sales pitch that comes with such a uniquely silly premise gives it a good shot of achieving success-especially if it gets the extra pop of going over well with audiences this weekend. The $95 mil run of M3GAN's is unattainable on account of its R-rating and the severely crowded March slate it's going to run into starting next week with Creed III, but if all goes well, it could very well match the nearly $50 mil that Violent Night made in December.
Price: $11 ULT/$11 BO
Predictions: $9-18 mil OW/1-4 PTA/2-7 Top 5/mid to high 6 IMDB/$33-55 mil total BO
Worth Putting on Your Slate?: I'm currently regretting picking Knock at the Cabin over it, so if you have a spare $11 and are looking for a modest hit, it should fit the bill nicely.


Before the Frasier reboot money came calling, Kelsey Grammer was able to fit in one final low-paying gig in a God movie. Jesus Revolution (Lionsgate) is latest piece of fact-based Evangelical propaganda from Jon Erwin-who directs without his brother Andrew for the first time, Grammer plays Southern California pastor Chuck Smith-who began to tailor his sermons to a younger audience during the turbulent days of the Vietnam War after crossing paths with an 18-year old hippie Lonnie Frisbee (Jonathan Rumie-who plays Jesus on The Chosen) and eventually founded the network of megachurches/radio stations knows as the Calvary Chapel Association. I wonder if the film will also Smith's history of being a doomsday conspiracy theorist or how Frisbee made a career out of preaching against homosexuality while being a closeted gay man himself until he publicly apologized for his past sermons and came out as gay after being diagnosed with AIDS in the early 90's.

As per usual for a faith-based movie, there's really no good way to gauge how Jesus Revolution will do. Evangelical movies largely askew the traditional tracking metrics and films with this ideology are traditionally very hit-or-miss at the box office. Not even the inclusion of an Erwin brother and their longtime screenwriting partner Jon Gunn makes Jesus Revolution easy to track as their last film American Underdog only mustered $26.5 mil at the box office in late 2021/early 2022 and overall filmography outside of I Can Only Imagine isn't full of true hits. However, it is set to bow in about 2,500 theaters and there hasn't been a title to truly breakout from this faith in a good long while, so the potential for Jesus Revolution to sneak up on Hollywood and find an audience is absolutely there.

Price: $5 ULT/$4 BO
Predictions: $7-15 mil OW/1-4 PTA/1-8 Top 5/low to mid 7 IMDB/$18-40 mil total BO
Worth Putting on Your Slate?: Given its low price, it could prove to be a very worthwhile gamble.


Limited Releases:
There's release dumps, then there's whatever the hell is happening with Mummies (Warner Brothers) this weekend. The Spanish-British animated production hasn't been acknowledged on WB's social media or received any sort of push on Discovery's large network of cable channels and while I have no real grasp on how many theaters it'll be opening in, it has zero presence in my neck of the woods-which is very atypical for any release that's bigger than a handful of theaters on OW. Listings on theater chain sites is legitimately the only reason I even know it's still being released this weekend. With all that being said, it's safe to say that nobody will be including this on their slates.
Price: $4 ULT/$2 BO
Predictions: $500k-$1.5 mil OW/0 PTA or top 5/high 5 to low 6 IMDB/$2-4 mil total BO
Worth Putting on Your Slate?: No.


You know, you love it: it's time for the IFC Day-and-Date Throwaway Pick of the Week!!! The star of this edition is God's Time (IFC)-a quirky comedy about two friends in NYC that try and stop their other friend from killing her ex-boyfriend. It had its fans following its premiere at Tribeca last summer and it might find a few more this weekend, but unless you share my budgeting problems in ULT, it will provide you nothing but a nice IMDb score and thus, won't be a strong addition to your linueps. That's all for this edition of the IFC Day-and-Date Throwaway Pick of the Week. See you again soon folks.
Price: $2 ULT/$1 BO
Predictions: $8-15k OW/0 PTA or top 5/low to mid 7 IMDB/$13-35k total BO
Worth Putting on Your Slate?: Absolutely not.


Weekend Predictions:
1.Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania $48 mil
2.Cocaine Bear $16 mil
3.Jesus Revolution $11 mil
4.Avatar: The Way of Water $4 mil
5.Puss in Boots: The Last Wish $3.5 mil

PTA: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Cocaine Bear, Jesus Revoltion, Return to Seoul, Emily

Tune in next week when six breaks down Adonis Creed's return to the ring and perhaps makes a passing mention of the new Guy Ritchie film that was just acquired by Lionsgate and dated for wide release 9 days ago.

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I'm wondering if Mummies is one of those test market movies that is only getting a theatrical release to fulfill a contractual obligation and ends up not reporting box office. We saw it a couple of years back when STX released that dreadful Queenpins movie into a few markets. Meanwhile, Warner Bros. seems to be about the only major studio still doing the token theatrical run instead of dumping titles onto streaming (remember the Impractical Jokers movie that somehow took off?). I have to imagine we'll see Mummies on HBO Max in a couple of months followed by a random DVD release where it's $10 at Target on release day.

As for the wide openers, I have a feeling audiences will see that Cocaine Bear is a one-joke premise that won't deliver the goods. The entire joke is in the title and the premise sounds like something a junior high kid pitched. As for Jesus Revolution, I haven't seen one trailer for this even though Lionsgate seemingly wanted it to be a hit after pulling the ad budget on Call Jane to market this one. Also, I have to expect both films are filled with embellishments and have very little relations to the true stories they claim to be based on.

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For my FY slate I hope Cocaine Bear opens to 16m, but the lack of early press worries me, and it could be nothing but a niche of excited fans. If it opens past 10m I'll be happy

[Chienfantome]

It's funny because Warner did a proper release of Mummies here in France a couple of weeks ago, and it did fine numbers even if unremarkable, staying in the Top 5 in the first two weeks.

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But keep in mind that American Warner Bros. is basically run by Snydercut and tried to focus the future of the company around Black Adam.

They've probably spent more money defending Ezra Miller than marketing anything that's not a DC movie this year.

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Cocaine Bear is off to a good start. It did $2 mil in previews last night, which is almost a million above what Violent Night did in December ahead of its $13.5 mil opening and the early PostTrak exits are at 82% positive and 4/5 stars-which are both higher than M3GAN.

[Buscemi2]

Cocaine Bear isn't horror and it's not PG-13, so of course it's going to have a higher reaction score from the target audience than M3gan did.

I'd say a better comparison would be whatever the most recent raunchy comedy was.

[Buscemi2]

And we have our first A+ Cinemascore of the year. Jesus Revolution gets it, confirming my belief that the film was sanitized to appeal to the Evangelical crowd of today.

And Cocaine Bear got a B-, which isn't very good for a comedy.

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Weekend Estimates:
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania $32.2 mil (nearly 70% drop, which would be the worst ever for an MCU movie and any superhero movie that opened to 100+ mil)
Cocaine Bear $23.1 mil
Jesus Revolution $15.5 mil
Avatar: The Way of Water $4.7 mil
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish $4.1 mil
Magic Mike's Last Dance $3 mil (Deadline and TheNumbers both had $3 mil on their charts opposed to the $1.9 mil BOM had, so I'm going with the majority)
Knock at the Cabin $1.9 mil
80 for Brady $1.8 mil
Missing $1 mil
A Man Called Otto $850k

PTA:
Ant-Man $7,410
Cocaine Bear $6,533
Jesus Revolution $6,272
Return to Seoul $4,043
Violent Night $2,557 (the West Coast drive-in circuit strikes again )

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That and Universal is desperately trying to get Violent Night to $50 million.

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Weekend Actuals:
1.Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania $32 mil
2.Cocaine Bear $23.3 mil
3.Jesus Revolution $15.8 mil
4.Avatar: The Way of Water $4.9 mil
5.Puss in Boots: The Last Wish $4.1 mil
6.Magic Mike's Last Dance $2.9 mil
7.80 for Brady $1.9 mil
8.Knock at the Cabin $1.87 mil
9.Missing $1 mil
10.A Man Called Otto $852k

-God's Time $6k


PTA:
1.Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania $7,357
2.Cocaine Bear $6,582
3.Jesus Revolution $6,385
4.Return to Seoul $3,685 (11 theaters)
5.Violent Night $2,870

-God's Time $370 (17 theaters)

Mummies has yet to report. Also, The Quiet Girl debuted to $59k in 6 theaters.

[Buscemi2]

As I suggested earlier, I wouldn't expect Mummies to report.