Notable Openings This Weekend: The Bye Bye Man, Monster Trucks, Sleepless, Live by Night, Patriots Day
We have a lot of convoluted crap to cover, so bear with me, alright! There are movies expanding. Movies being dumped under the radar. This time of year is such a mess, for the love of snow caps! Maybe we should all just stay home and watch Inception or something, I don’t know. This will be a long-winded article that ends with “Hidden Figures will repeat as #1.” Let’s get the absolute bottom of the barrel garbage out of the way first.
Monster Trucks. Remember Max Steel from a few months ago? It’s a live action kids movie nobody cares about. The end. Sleepless technically includes a big name star (Jamie Foxx), but there’s a reason why it’s being released January 13th and reviews weren’t made available until about five minutes ago. I’m sure Jamie Foxx’s people are trying to clean this up faster than when your kid spills apple juice on the rug. Wipe it up before it stains. Even though horror has fared well recently, it will be tough for The Bye Bye Man to crack the top five. I’m sure it was made for a bucket of golf balls though, so whatever. Alright, onto the real stuff.
Patriots Day finally expands into wide release. I feel like we’ve been talking about this movie for 85 years. I reviewed the film weeks ago. While it probably seemed like a good idea to give this a wide release in a time where competition is scattered, the movie doesn’t seem to be gaining a lot of traction. That’s a shame, because it’s a damn good movie. Maybe people were turned off at how soon they made the film, or maybe Mark Wahlberg has that Jennifer Lawrence syndrome – over exposure. For whatever reason, the buzz feels abysmal despite good reviews. It won’t be a complete disaster, but it won’t make the money I originally thought it could.
Speaking of Jennifer Lawrence syndrome, Live by Night opens in wide release, Ben Affleck’s fourth directorial effort. This is on a crash course to bomb big time. This is so infuriating. It’s a solid film, but people look at that damn Rotten Tomato score and have all decided, “Oh, this movie must suck.” No, it doesn’t. Even if you aren’t a big fan of this movie, there’s no way it should correlate to a 32% rating. Hmmmm…reminds me of another Ben Affleck movie from last year. I’ve stressed this a million times, but the score on Rotten Tomatoes you want to look at is the Average Rating under that big FAT red/green number. That number currently holds a 5.3/10. Still not great, but it’s absolutely more accurate of the film’s quality. This is another example of the TOO MUCH SUCCESS ALERT! TOO MUCH SUCCESS ALERT! Yeah, let’s take Affleck’s directing prowess down a peg! The movie isn’t great, but it doesn’t deserve the absolute thrashing it’s been getting.
HOW WILL IT ALL BREAK DOWN…
Once again, La La Land will be the real star. This could be a movie that makes around $15 Million for the next two months. Despite all the new releases,  Hidden Figures will repeat as #1.
1. Hidden Figures – $23 Million
2. Patriots Day – $19.5 Million
3. La La Land – $15 Million
4. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story – $14.5 Million
5. Sing – $11 Million
