Movie Enthusiast Issue 44: Phantom Thread, Graduation, and the Second Annual Box Office Olympics
Two new movie reviews from me this week, which is basically a rare astronomical event:
First, I reviewed Phantom Thread, which is finally opening everywhere this Friday. It’s really good! You should go see it! It’s the first Paul Thomas Anderson movie I can say I unequivocally love, which I realize might mean that fans of PTA’s previous work might be baffled or disappointed by what he’s up to here. I tried to anticipate some of that potential criticism and offer a tentative, non-spoilery suggestion of why the movie’s much better than what its most skeptical detractors say: http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-beguiling-beauty-of-paul-thomas-andersons-phantom-thread/article/2011013
Second, an essay I wrote last summer on Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation is finally out in the wild! When you sit on a piece for that long without thinking about it, there’s a worry at the back of your mind that you’ll read it when it finally gets published and immediately see all the things you wish you had done differently or explained better. I was pleased to give this a reread and find that I wouldn’t have changed much of anything at all. This review does get pretty deep into the exact details of the plot, so if you want to watch the movie before having me spoil it for you, go watch it on Netflix tonight then come back here: http://farefwd.com/2018/01/review-cristian-mungius-graduation/
Okay! Moving on!
Last year I tallied up the box office returns of all the movies I had seen in theaters to do a little bit of comparing and to see if any trends emerged out of the admittedly small sample size of new movies I had seen in the calendar year. This ended up being a fun way of contextualizing my year in movie-watching and gave me a lot to mull over in terms of the impact that movies actually have and the inscrutability of the post-theatrical lives of new releases. So, let’s see how this year went!
2017 U.S. Total Domestic Grosses (through 1/7/18)
for films I saw that had a U.S. theatrical run in 2017
(Number in parentheses = box office rank)
Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi – $572,513,602 (1)
Wonder Woman – $412,563,408 (3)
Dunkirk – $188,045,546 (14)
Get Out – $175,484,140 (16)
Baby Driver – $107,825,862 (27)
Blade Runner 2049 – $91,700,024 (33)
The Big Sick – $42,873,127 (60)
Lady Bird – $34,114,891 (69)
Wind River – $33,800,859 (70)
The Shape of Water – $21,653,464 (94)
mother! – $17,800,004 (103)
It Comes At Night – $13,985,117 (112)
The Beguiled – $10,576,669 (120)
The Lost City of Z – $8,580,410 (125)
I Am Not Your Negro – $7,123,919 (131)
Call Me By Your Name – $6,084,655 (139)
The Florida Project – $5,410,416 (145)
Your Name. – $5,017,246 (148)
The Post – $3,849,656 (154)
The Salesman – $2,402,067 (178)
Good Time – $2,026,499 (188)
A Quiet Passion – $1,865,396 (191)
A Ghost Story – $1,596,371 (204)
The Wedding Plan – $1,412,404 (214)
Personal Shopper – $1,305,195 (218)
The Square – $1,252,038 (222)
Columbus – $1,015,339 (236)
Phantom Thread – $951,950 (241)
The Red Turtle – $921,974 (244)
Faces Places – $640,750 (264)
Novitiate – $568,550 (269)
Song to Song – $443,684 (289)
Stalker (2017 Re-release) – $269,881 (319)
Graduation – $175,975 (353)
Ex Libris: The New York Public Library – $151,356 (366)
The Unknown Girl – $150,532 (368)
The Ornithologist – $50,511 (448)
Maurice (2017 Re-release) – $45,926 (457)
Hermia & Helena – $43,152 (460)
The Death of Louis XIV – $43,113 (462)
A Woman’s Life – $37,626 (472)
Rat Film – $34,893 (476)
The Son of Joseph – $30,588*
Nocturama – $26,291 (509)
4 Days in France – $12,273 (591)
The Work – $5,853 (651)
I (somehow) saw The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) in theaters, but could not find box office returns for it.
*I think The Son of Joseph initially had some theatrical showings in 2016 before playing in more markets in 2017; in any case, I couldn't find a box-office rank for it in 2017.
Some observations and questions for further investigation:
The biggest winners, at a glance: Get Out, which made back 35x(!!) its budget ($5 million) and A Ghost Story, which made back nearly 16x its own ($100,000). And who says you can’t make a successful movie for peanuts?
In all of the end-of-year conversations around mother! I kept hearing film critics point out that, for as much as film critics love talking about it, nobody saw mother! Well, compared to Star Wars, sure, but if $17 million in ticket sales is “nobody” then what’s the word for the portion of the population that shelled out a collective $26,000 to see Nocturama in theaters? (For the record, I tried twice, three months apart to see Nocturama in a theater but had to settle for Netflix.)
Graduation was the lowest-grossing film I saw that had a wider-than-specialty-theaters-only release (i.e., it was released by a fairly major distributor and played in Landmark theaters nationwide). Compare that with Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which grossed just over $1 million when it played in the U.S. in 2008. I’m fascinated by the circumstances under which foreign-language films get an American box-office boost, largely because I can never entirely understand them. 4 Months is a much more difficult sit, but it also won the Palme d’Or the year it was initially released, which must have given the distributor some marketing leverage. I wonder what else factored in to that film’s success Stateside?
It’s interesting to note the niche markets that you discern from some of this data. For instance, The Wedding Plan, an Israeli film, grossed more than some films that I would have thought would make more based on their potential for wider audience appeal (Columbus, Personal Shopper). I suspect The Wedding Plan, which played in 123 theaters at the height of its release, made a lot of its money from small, specialty neighborhood theaters. I really want to know what these theaters are and how they strategize to get viewers in seats (and if there’s anything they could be doing better to get even more people to see these movies).
I Am Not Your Negro hit the sweet spot by coming out at that time of year after the inauguration when everyone wanted a voice of clarity to help cut through the nonsense we’d been living through the past couple of months, and boy did James Baldwin ever deliver. $7 million is a really impressive number for a non-Michael Moore, non-Al Gore-affiliated documentary.
I’m surprised in the most heartening way by how much money a Tarkovsky film is able to make in a short theatrical run in 2017. It made even more than Janus Films re-release of Chimes at Midnight last year, in that one had both Shakespeare and Orson Welles going for it! Relatedly, I just learned that Janus will be touring a retrospective of Ingmar Bergman’s movies for his centennial, which means I not only may finally watch Cries and Whispers this year but may get to see it in a theater to boot.
How much money would Okja, Mudbound, and The Meyerowitz Stories have made if Netflix had bothered with a nationwide day-and-date theatrical release strategy? How much did the filmmakers involved actually make from the Netflix release? How didn’t anybody involved in the Okja release see how that movie would have played much better in a theater setting? The world may never know.
That’s probably enough for me to chew on the next couple of months. Now that I have a full-time job again, I’m planning on getting out to major studio releases more frequently this year. Already I have The Commuter, Black Panther, and A Wrinkle in Time staring me down in Q1. I’m curious to see what box-office stories 2018 will bring.
Alright, that’s all for now. I’ll be back in two weeks with my personal 2017 Oscar nominees (if, you know, they actually gave me a ballot). Will I actually bother to go see I, Tonya, Downsizing, and/or Three Billboards in theaters for the sake of completion? Tune in next time to find out!