Movie Nation

Projections for how big “Ready Player One” were a bit fuzzy, with it having a Wed. night opening and then an entire Easter Weekend to make some coin.

The $40 million or so 3/day always seemed low, and a big Wed., very big Thursday and $15 million Friday seem to point toward something closer to $50 million than $40 million.

But Saturday will be telling. Deadline.come is still it’ll have over $40 over the weekend (excluding Monday), $53-55 since Wed by midnight Sunday.

They’ve been inching their predictions upward, but I still say they’re underestimating it. When I saw it with a mostly-college crowd pre-opening, about a third seemed REALLY into it (gamers, pop culture sponges of the “Family Guy” fanbase variety). It panders to that crowd for two hours and 20 minutes — endless inside jokes, pop culture references, game tricks, etc. Their talking it up will only carry so much water, but again, a Sat. as big or bigger than Friday will be the tell.

Tyler Perry’s days of opening Madea movies into the $25 million range may be over, but he’s still got enough of a brand to pull in $16 million for one of his tortured relationships in the African American community melodramas. “Acrimony” is managing that.

“Pacific Rim: Uprising” fell off a cliff, “A Wrinkle in Time” and “Tomb Raider” are both on track to fall well short of $100 million before they disappear from screens.

“Black Panther” is still pulling them in, #3 at the box office this weekend, but finally fading. It will have cleared $650 million in the U.S. by Sunday night. Stunning.

The best thing about the blase but soft-selling faith-based drama “I Can Only Imagine” and the weak-lead Biblical period piece “Paul, the Apostle,” is that they’ve killed off the angry, defiantly superstitious “God’s Not Dead” movies. That’s a proven brand, making money off Christian victimization in an increasingly secular (and educated) America.

And the third film in the franchise is on nearly 2,000 screens and can’t even crack the top ten. Deadline.com is notorious for under-estimating Sat and Sunday takes on most films, kiddie fare and faith-based movies especially. But right now this one is not set to clear $3 million. That could change, but in any event, the other two Easter movies in the genre have sucked all the air out of that house fire.

Wes Anderson’s charming, touching animated “Isle of Dogs” is only on 165 screens, and it may hit $3 million. Not in the top ten, but better “Dogs” than “Dead.”

The first thing that jumps out at from this trailer is the film’s tone  — melancholy, despairing. Ethan Hawke is a preacher at the end of his rope in this Paul Schrader drama.

The great thing about the existence of A24 as a film studio/distributor is that Schrader, one of the great screenwriters of the ’70s, director of “Cat People” and “Mishima” and “Light Sleeper” and “Affliction,” doesn’t have to beg Lindsay Lohan to show up so that he can get distribution for a movie.

With A24, one of the elder statesmen of cinema — he wrote “Taxi Driver” and “The Mosquito Coast” and “City Hall,” along with films he also directed — can make his kind of movie and land Amanda Seyfried, Ethan Hawke and Cedric Kyles.

It’s a drama. Cedric the Entertainer is using his real name for this one.

Look for “First Reformed,” a man of faith’s test of faith, in May.

me from this trailer is the name Cedric Kyles.

So not having read Ernest Cline’s YA novel “Ready Player One,” one of the first things that struck me when watching it was a “Where have I seen this sensory game-suit?” that the film trots out as The Next Big Thing in immersive video gaming — in 2045.

That idea is a sort of Holy Grail that’s been kicked around in science fiction and game idea boards for a while, seeing as how gaming chairs have gotten more sophisticated with time. If you’re going to lose yourself in an alternate reality, you really have to feel what your avatar is going through in that reality.

Pain? Maybe. Exertion? Sexual stimulation? Yeah, the thinking runs that way.

Which is one reason that’s the BIG PITCH the ditzy nerds of Netflix’s “Game Over, Man” want to make to the Tunisian billionaire playboy/playa/player who throws a party at the swank LA hotel where they’re custodians.

They make their pitch, for “Skintendo,” a Nintendo pun sensory suit, just before the bad guys take over the party and go all “Die Hard” on one and all.

“Skintendo.” That’s what Wade Watt is wearing in “Ready Player One.”

Well played, Netflix. And uh, Adam Devine.

Earlier projections, based on tracking data, had Steven Spielberg’s spin on Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One” under-performing at the domestic box office. $40 million was predicted.

The trailers don’t do it eye-candy justice, the endless parade of Easter Eggs, inside jokes piled up for film and game and pop culture fans, can’t be summed up in a single review.

But Thursday night’s opening was a lot better than expected. It did $3.75 million Wednesday night. It earned over $12, maybe over $13 million on just Thursday “previews.” Deadline.com has moved its prediction up to well over $50 million.

As I said yesterday, it has the feel of a broad demographic appeal, four corners hit. Word of mouth is a given, repeat visits will be a must for the crowd it is aimed at.  It’s on over 4200 screens, a HUGE number for a March opening.

I figure $60 million is on the low end of expectations. Not a “Black Panther” sized blockbuster, but in that ballpark. A big Friday will confirm that. Is $70 within reach? $80? I don’t see a reason why it wouldn’t.

It’s piling up money overseas, $40 million and counting already.

[Did Netflix scoop “Ready Player One” with its raunchy, game-friendly farce “Game Over, Man?”]

This is a real eye-popper of a trailer.

Lurid colors, vamped up “Sin City/Streets of Fire” settings. Simon Pegg playing another hit man. Mike Myers acting into his dotage.

Max Irons. Kind of “Kill Me Three Times” or “Seven Psychopaths” meets “Sin City,” if I’m reading the plot summary right. A May 11 release directed by Vaughn Stein. Not a household name…yet.

“Outside In” is a quiet, contemplative melodrama about starting over and the obstacles facing an ex-con fresh out of a 20 year stretch in prison.

The script that director Lynn Shelton (“Humpday,” “Your Sister’s Sister”) co-wrote with her fellow “mumblecore” icon Jay Duplass (“Jeff Who Lives at Home,” “The Puffy Chair”) has secrets and surprises, layers that peel away as we follow that ex-con and wonder why so many people are so welcoming when he comes back home.

Chris, played by Duplass, is sheepish when his younger brother (Ben Schwartz) drives him back into Granite Falls, Washington. There’s a surprise “Welcome Home” party.

“People have been waiting 20 years for this,” Ted tells him. “Suck it up and receive the love.”

Among those waiting for him is the woman who got him out. Carol, played by Edie Falco, is his former high school teacher, a woman who made his case her cause. Her digging got him out. Her communications, when his family and others turned their backs, gave him hope and kept him going.

Chris is grateful, but much more. He’s so touched, so nervous around her that we can wonder if there wasn’t something going on between them before that felony conviction.

The fact that she’s got a husband (Charles Leggett) and teenage daughter (Kaitlyn Dever) doesn’t deter him. He’s in love. He must be with her.

The husband is leery and a little sarcastic upon meeting his Carol’s “project.”

“Maybe now I can get my wife back.”

But the teen daughter, Hildy, is curious, sympathetic and perhaps a little too eager to keep company with a 40 year-old ex-con whom she’s only known from her mom’s research into his life and crime.

Duplass is better known as a writer/director than actor. Mark Duplass (“Safety Not Guaranteed”) is the “acting” Duplass brother. But Jay, who was in TV’s “Search Party,” “The Mindy Project” and “Transparent,” gives Chris a kind of lost quality the belies the horrors of what he must have endured in stir in Walla Walla.

He aimlessly checks back into a mothballed life, riding the ancient BMX bike gathering dust in the family garage, taking his first jumps with a kid less than one-third his age because that’s what feels normal.

The great Falco (“Transamerica,””Nurse Jackie”) suggests a woman good at keeping secrets, straining to keep the younger man at arm’s length, burying the longing that a dull marriage has built up.

And Dever, of TV’s “Last Man Standing” and last summer’s “Detroit,” beautifully mimics Falco’s air of mystery, a not-quite-sullen teen who is distancing herself from her unhappy parents, at a loss for finding somebody to talk to about them or about herself in this tiny, rainy, fog-shrouded town.

I’m sticking with my opening label of “melodrama” for this, as events transpire that rather archly heighten the drama even if they’re conventional tropes of forbidden love romances. But Shelton and Duplass cook up twists to each of these predictable turns that their story takes.

And thoughtful performances render this intimate drama a rewarding and engrossing look into life after prison, and a mystery well worth waiting for its unraveling.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with sexual situations, alcohol abuse and profanity

Cast: Jay Duplass, Edie Falco, Kaitlyn Dever

Credits:Directed by Lynn Shelton, script by Lynn Shelton and Jay Duplass. An Orchard release.

Running time: 1:31

It varies from family to family, the one member everybody calls “the rock,” “the glue” that seems to hold them all together.

And when that glue is gone, it can seem as if gravity itself has failed. Members spin off, aimlessly, lose their footing. Every flaw they kept under wraps can show itself, every one of those flaws a new stress on their coherence as a group. It all stops making sense.

“Love After Love” is a quietly distressing disintegration, a film full of grief unspoken, but showing in every member of a family’s loss of footing, responsibility and sanity after the death of a patriarch. Co-writer/director Russell Harbaugh has created a chamber tragedy, intimate in its dimensions, devastating in the damage we see spiral out of that one death.

It opens with a woman (Andie MacDowell) questioning a man, Nick (Chris O’Dowd) about his state of happiness. He shrugs.

“I mean, what’s ‘happy,’ really? It’s so arbitrary.”

His relationship, with the smart and beautiful Rebecca (Juliet Rylance)?

She “validates how I feel about the world.”

And the woman doing the questioning, who it turns out, is Nick’s mother?

“You can’t always be happy.”

As they head back outdoors to the extended family gathering, the reasons for the philosophical musings become obvious. For all the randy, frank talk about the difference between “an open marriage” and just “swingers,” there’s a pall hanging over the drinking and laughter. The brother who drinks too much (James Adomian), the marriage ( Francesca Faridany) that strains, other considerations fall aside. Dad (Gareth Williams) can barely speak above a hoarse whisper. We can guess what’s going on.

Harbaugh’s film skips forward to the world that father Glenn’s death has created. Brother Chris (Adomian) and wife Karen (Faridany) are in trouble. Mother Suzanne, a college drama teacher and costumer, has taken on a brittle intolerance of her students and colleagues.

And Nick, a book editor, has utterly lost his way. His acting the bounder included sex with a young actress (Dree Hemingway, daughter of Mariel) in the back of his Volvo at the orchard behind his parents’ house, and now Rebecca is no more.

She is “a woman of consequence,” a more unfiltered Mom snaps. Rebecca was challenging and her mere presence as Nick’s BS detector is missed. There’s nobody around to point out how self-absorbed and self-destructive he can be, no one to endure his hypocritical tirades, lashing out at Rebecca when the viewer knows he’s the heel here.

Chris may drunkenly tell Nick “You’re the GOOD one,” but his coping mechanisms seem less self-destructive. An aimless unpublished “writer,” he channels his pain into a stand-up act that’s both icy and bracing (Adomian is a comic writer, actor and stand-up).

Nick? He’s lashing out, getting drunk, creating scenes at parties, threatening to break up other relationships, grasping at anything and anyone he thinks can give him back his footing — even Rebecca.

Harbaugh is said to have had his cast watch John Cassavetes dramas (“Love Streams,” “A Woman Under the Influence”) as a way of prepping to play these characters. That’s the tone he wanted — people deflated by life and loss, their sharp edges showing.

O’Dowd shows us a side we’ve never seen before, throwing around dramatic weight only hinted at in a mostly-comic film career. Rylance imbues her every scene with a gravitas that underscores what Suzanne has said of her — a woman “of consequence.”

And the ever-underrated MacDowell gives one of her finest dramatic turns, playing a woman who is supposed to replace her husband as “the rock” at the center of this clan, but so devastated and without bearings that she dates/sleeps around inappropriately and is of no help to her “boys,” as she has no moral high ground to stand upon.

“Love After Love” isn’t a happy tale or even one with an ending. Like Cassavetes, Harbaugh was going for doubt, and for the most part, he succeeds. It’s the uncertainty that drives the fear that motivates every character, the realization of mortality that has one and all struggling to “get on with it,” this business of adult life that almost all who knew him were able to postpone while Dad was still around.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, alcohol abuse, profanity, violence

Cast: Andie MacDowell, Chris O’Dowd,  Dree Hemingway, Juliet Rylance, James Adomian

Credits:Directed by Russell Harbaugh, script by Russell Harbaugh and Eric Mendelsohn. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:31

The shrinking importance of the North American box office to Hollywood is underlined by the increasing number of films that open overseas before making their bow in the U.S.

“Ready Player One,” which cost in the $175 million range, will turn a profit and almost certainly do so thanks to a healthy opening abroad. It’s already at $140 million and counting, per Deadline.com. 

Domestically, expectations are somewhat lower thanks to poor “early tracking” — the trailers, which give virtually none of the razzle and dazzle away, weren’t good. Earliest reviews were weaker than the final Metacritic/Rottentomatoes numbers for it.

That said, Box Office Mojo figures it’ll clear $41-50 on the long Easter holiday weekend. Earlier predictions were in the $35 range.

I am guessing word of mouth among its target audience — gamers — and the more effortlessly inclusive nature of its cast and the sheer spectacle of it will drive it even higher. That video game audience is bigger than the fairly large built-in audience of readers of Ernest Cline’s novel.

And Spielberg’s name still has cachet, although he’s not been in the “Let’s make mass appeal movies for under 25s” business since his “Jurassic Park” days, really.

With all that re-built “Let’s go to the movies” drive in under 30s built by “Black Panther” and the potency of the under 18s proven with “Jumanji,” “Ready Player One” could clear $60, even blow up to $70+, tracking be damned.

As I said in my review, it gives the people what they want. But we’ll see how many of them want it.

I don’t know what it is about Saab convertibles and movie road trips. But it’s a “car with character,” as in it says something about the owner, movie shorthand.

Volvos and Saabs? Typically driven by academic characters in the movies.

Ed Harris plays a legendary, aged photographer, Jason Sudeikis his estranged son and I gather that Olsen is the old man’s nurse. She’s found rolls of film the old man forgot to develop, and the three of them have to drive to Kansas to the last plant that processes Kodachrome film.

“Kodachrome” comes to Netflix April 20.