Whatever audience awareness tracking and pre-release ticket sales say about how a film will perform at the box office, the defining clue is that moment the rubber meets the road — opening night, still called “previews” by the studios.
“The Woman King” had a $3.1 million opening Thursday, and opened just over $19 million.
“Don’t Worry Darling,” with all the buzz — much of it bad — had high awareness and a special early EARLY preview of IMAX showings in the larger cities. And it opened not Thursday night but late Thursday afternoon.
It’s “preview” take was still $3.1 million. All those predictions of curious filmgoers checking the film out, of Harry Styles fans following into his dotage and swarming the cineplexes were an illusion.
“Don’t Worry Darling” opened below the lower end of its expectations, which were $20-21 million.
It opened at $3.1 million, just like “The Woman King,” and the weekend estimate take now it $19.2 million, almost just like “The Woman King.”
Thanks #boxofficepro for confirming what seemed obvious Friday morning.
“The Woman King” had a slightly better second weekend than predicted, BTW.
“Railway Children” has more hugs in it than any British movie this side of “Love, Actually.” So much for chilly, oppressed English reserve — then or now.
This treacly trifle is the latest version of an E. Nesbit novel from 1905, a tale of city kids sadly separated from their parents and sent to live in the country.
This period-piece has been turned into at least three TV series and many movies, most famously a film from 1970. That movie’s Yorkshire locations, and one of its child stars — Jenny Agutter, who also starred in a 1960s TV version — are revived for this film, which wore the title “The Railway Children Return” at one point.
Setting this “reboot” of the tale during World War II, when British cities were being bombed and parents were urged to ship their kids off to the country, often to live with complete strangers, is such a clever touch that it’s shocking no one thought of it adapting it before. Perhaps one of the post-war versions did. That adds pathos and a hint of tragedy to the story, and raises the stakes.
Picking 1944 as the year when the sisters Lily (Beau Gadsdon) and Pattie (Eden Hamilton) and their little brother Ted (Zac Crudby) are packed off to stay with strangers is odd. The London Blitz was years before, and the big exodus of kids came earlier. But that’s a plot contrivance that makes another subtext fit.
Their nurse-mother takes them to their tearful farewell at the train station, sending them off with “Look after them, you’re the parent now” instructions to Lily.
They steam from Manchester (which was only bombed twice, in 1940) into the country, to scenic, quaint Oakworth where school teacher Annie (Sheridan Smith), her son Thomas (Austin Haynes) and Annie’s mother (Agutter) show up at the school to see who needs to be taken in.
A sweet touch — grandma remembers when she came to the country, a reference to Agutter’s film of 50 years ago. Another? Granny advises them to “wait” and see who can’t be placed. Most families would blanch at having to feed three extra mouths. “There’s a war on,” as folks said back then.
But they take on the three kids, keep calm and carry them home.
Life here is all schoolwork, “sweets” and precious few chores. Annie shows them how to run after they’ve fetched the morning’s eggs from her hens, so that they drop and break a few. The kids cut loose during a bread-making lesson by having a flour fight.
Not to be a fussbudget, but wasting food was a cardinal sin on an island that was rationing everything and worried about being starved out is a detail that some born-yesterday screenwriter should have looked up.
The three new kids join Thomas for rambles in the countryside, and playtime at the local railyard. That’s where he’s turned an abandoned trolley car into a clubhouse. It’s there, after tall, plucky Lily has handled a local bully, that they stumble across a deserter.
It’s wholly worthwhile for a film about Britain in World War II to introduce African American characters and the Jim Crow racism that the U.S. military dragged with it as it sent troops overseas. But this slight, unevenly-acted children’s film handles it rather clumsily.
AJ Aiken plays Abe, a teen who has been beaten by racist MPs (we see this happen several times) for fraternizing with the white local girls and who has decided to try and find his way home. The kids try to help, and bond with the stranger as they do.
That’s a well-intentioned but somewhat wan attempt to add a little gravitas to the “children’s war movie” proceedings. One other bit of military melodrama is introduced when a stray bomber looses a stray bomb. Not to worry. Manchester Lily knows just how to react.
“If you’re still alive after the noise is gone, you’re OK!”
Tom Courtenay shows up to twinkle through a moment or two, a visiting uncle relating news about the war, about “Rommel” and his army being “crushed” in North Africa. That was in 1942-43. Is this supposed to be before D-Day, or shortly after in 1944? One wonders just how much history those who scripted it dug into.
The World War II material carries a lot of the emotional and action weight in this “Railway Children,” with parents missing or actually missing in action, an air raid and American GIs bringing their problems from home with them. That stuff is simply handled, and rendered into thin drama. One wonders what on Earth Nesbitt’s novel had in it that carried the story along and gave it drama without WWII. And the epilogue that wraps this entire enterprise up is so namby pamby as to make one wonder why The War was used if they weren’t going to treat it as the perilous and sad event that it was, for adults as well as children.
Still, it’s all harmless enough, and a lovely Yorkshire travelogue if nothing else. Gadsdon (“The Girl in the Spider’s Web,” “Rogue One” and young Princess Margaret in TV’s “The Crown) is the stand-out performer. Try not to notice how distracted the other kid-players seem in group scenes.
Rating: PG
Cast: Beau Gadsdon, Austin Haynes, KJ Aikens, Eden Hamilton, Sheridan Smith, Zac Cudby, Tom Courtenay, John Bradley and Jenny Agutter.
Credits: Directed by Morgan Matthews, scripted by Daniel Brockhurst and Jemma Rogers, based on the 1970 film which was based on a novel by E. Nesbit. A Blue Fox release.
“Don’t Worry Darling” did preview numbers that matched those of “The Woman King” a week ago –about $3.1 million.
But Olivia Wilde’s critically-panned, bad-buzzed sci fi “Stepford” thing had IMAX previews earlier in the week, and opened earlier on Thursday afternoon to boot
They were expecting Harrymania and the curious Looky Loos to push this one to $27 million plus.
It’s opening a third or so below that, very close to “Woman King’s” $19 million. Figure $21 million, or a smidge more or less, based on Friday’s take.
“The Woman King” is heading towards a $10-11 million second weekend. Always happy to see a good movie hang around.
Like a bad green-with-age copper penny, “Avatar” has earned a re release with a sequel due out over the holidays. With a preview for the next film slapped on in front of the James Cameron epic, it added $9 million to it’s overall take.
“Barbarian” is adding another $4.75 million to the kitty.
“Pearl” and “Bullet Train” and “See How They Run” are in the $1.9 to $1.7 million range.
Not quite enough to chase “Top Gun” out of the top ten. But any day now…
The director who made his name with farces, who got Oscar glory for turning sentimental, serious and only occasionally silly with “Green Book,” gives us his take on Vietnam with another dramedy inspired by a true story in “The Greatest Beer Run Ever.”
It’s about a New Yorker who sets off on a quixotic quest bring his pals “from the neighborhood” a beer. It’s the middle of the Vietnam War. They’re serving. He’ll do his part by delivering Pabst Blue Ribbon to a combat zone.
This “beer run” from Inwood, Manhattan, to Saigon and “up country” environs starts jaunty, gets somber and sentimental and then goes oh-so-very-wrong. You’ll feel it the instant it happens, just as I did. And when the ironic, tone-deaf tune that accompanies this eye-opening (to our hero) murder is reprised in a more emotional setting in the film’s finale, we’re all allowed to wonder if this Farrelly fellow ever had a clue.
Zac Efron stars as John “Chickie” Donohue, an oiler (engine maintenance) in the merchant marine, who travels for work and between voyages lays around his parents’ house when he’s not down at the the local pub. It’s a working class neighborhood — white, blue collar and patriotic. In 1967, Inwood was the sort of place you didn’t want to be questioning the war, the government running it or America in front of the locals.
Especially “The Colonel” (Bill Murray), the barkeep/owner of their favorite watering hole.
“War is NOT a TV show,” he grouses at the negative coverage that was just starting to take hold in ’67. Chickie agrees, which makes for spirited debates with his younger, peace-protesting sister (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis, quite good). Guys from their neighborhood — friends — are dying. They’ve all been to the wakes and the funerals.
But it’s one thing to wave the flag and support the troops from 12,000 miles away. If only there was something they could do. You know, buy’em a beer or something.
“I could do that,” Chickie declares. He can’t be serious. Or sober.
“”The man’s stone sober. That’s his fifth beer...tops,” the Colonel avows. Yeah. It’d be great to “bring our boys some good Ol’ American beer” in Vietnam.
The screenplay’s brightest moments are the ways fate and Chickie’s big mouth contrive to hold him to that vow. It’s not just his pals ribbing him over drinks. Mothers start showing up at the door, asking him to deliver some socks to this guy, take a rosary to that one. And damned if the fellow down at the Seafarers union hall doesn’t have a ship Vietnam-bound “in three hours.”
It’s right on the edge of hilarious that Chickie gets bum-rushed on board with a duffel full of PBRs and addresses of a handful of guys he knows to track down “in country.”
That first beer delivery, to an MP in Saigon, goes exactly as Chickie had hoped — a look of delighted surprise, brewskies all around, and dressed as he is, Chickie finds himself mistaken for “a tourist” — ‘Nam slang for “CIA.” That’ll facilitate his travels around South Vietnam to make his rounds. No American questions a “civilian” dressed like that.
But the jolly, jaunty mood of “Beer Run” ends the moment the guy has to wait for bodies to be off-loaded before boarding a transport. The good cheer he senses from this local bartender or that friendly, “Oklahoma” fan Vietnamese traffic cop fades as Chickie hits a firebase and sees things Americans at home weren’t seeing or hearing about — not yet. Not pre-Tet.
As in “Green Book,” the arc of the story is the naive, knee-jerk hero’s eyes being opened — here by violence, seemingly pointless sacrifice and war crimes.
Efron gamely plays-up Chickie’s ebullience at “surprising” this soldier or that one, only to be the last one to figure out that he’s risked his life for nothing, and his presence puts their lives at risk as well.
GIs barking “What the hell are you doing?” and “You think this is FUNNY?” are speaking for themselves, and for the viewer, who is treated to a CIA murder, a traumatized Vietnamese child weeping at seeing another Ugly American, coffins and a tactless search “for my friend” by the frivolous, tactless guy in the plaid shirt in a triage tent full of the dead and wounded in the middle of the Tet Offensive.
Farrelly and the screenwriters take another stab at making conservatives understand the role of a free press, serving up the always-cynical press corps, which Chickie rages at for not being “patriotic” and reporting this war in more flattering terms. The whole “stabbed in the back by the press” trope, “letting the troops down/bad for morale” argument gets one more airing.
“The truth doesn’t hurt us,” the veteran Look Magazine writer/photographer played by Russell Crowe lectures. “It’s the lies.“
I dare say the real Donohue, whose memoir this is based on, might be a little surprised at how unflattering this portrait of his exploit turns out to be.
Farrelly struggles to strike the right notes, and he finds them, here and there. A lot of the sentimental moments play, and several laughs land. This is one daft idea, a fool undertaking a fool’s errand (What do you think GIs drank off duty “over there?” “Good ol’American beer.”) that sobers up a naive, flag-waving joker with a simplistic world view and glib take on the violence of being in combat.
But “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” falls to Earth the moment someone “falls” out of a helicopter. All the PBR in the world can’t make anybody watching it forget that. And setting that incident to the easy listening hit “Cherish” — and then reminding us you did it in a tender moment at the end — is as big a miscalculation as any Farrelly has ever made. And remember, Peter and his brother thought a reboot of “The Three Stooges” was a good idea.
Rating: R for language and some war violence
Cast: Zac Efron, Russell Crowe, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis, Kyle Allen, Jake Picking, Will Ropp and Bill Murray.
Credits: Directed by Peter Farrelly, scripted by Brian Hayes Currie, Peer Farrelly and Pete Jones, based on the memoir by John “Chickie” Donohue and J.T. Molloy. An Apple+ release.
It’s a Vietnam War movie, so of course there’s a soundtrack packed with 1960s pop and rock — “Cherish” (badly used) to “Let It All Hang Out,” it’s not “Good Morning, Vietnam,” but “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” does blow through some cash on music rights.
No, Zac Efron doesn’t sing in it. Or dance.
Set in 1967, here’s a song that we haven’t heard in any of the scores of films set in and during the Vietnam War. Remember, many Vietnamese spoke French, as the French had just been forced out in the previous decade. So if the locals were jamming to The Beatles, they just might have preferred the French version, also a hit, recorded by this legend.
There’s a sweet twist to this sad news, that James Earl Jones has retired.
Vanity Fair makes it official, the great man with the singular voice is hanging it up at 91. But Lucasfilm is passing a last big check his way as he signs over rights to the voice of Darth Vader forever.
Well done all around. Great actor, a fun and fascinating interview. Caught him on a bad day once and he was still more interesting than half the actors you meet. Caught him on a great day and he could not have been kinder or grander.
Movie Nation 