A24’s release of Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale had a strong holdover its second weekend out, grossing $168.5k on the same six screens in NYC and LA where it opened its first frame to the biggest per theater average of the year – beating the distributor’s March release of Everything Everywhere All At Once. This weekend’s
Empire Of Light
From its triumphant world premiere (with seven-minute standing ovation) at the Venice Film Festival, A24 opens Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale in theaters this weekend amid a whirl of Oscar buzz around star Brendan Fraser. The former action star carries the psychological drama as Charlie, a reclusive and severely obese English teacher trying to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter. Deadline critic
Editor’s note: Deadline presents the 43rd episode of its video series Take Two, in which Pete Hammond and Todd McCarthy tackle the artistry of films just opening in theaters every weekend. Each has reviewed and written about the craft for decades and built a remarkable breadth of knowledge of films past and present. What we hoped for
A steady flow of specialty films starts this weekend with the return of a key player to cinemas and a broader arthouse slate that will expand steadily into awards season. This is still a weird theatrical landscape but independent distributors and theater owners have agreed for months that there’s no recovery without a brisker pace
Searchlight has announced that the next movie from American Beauty Oscar winning filmmaker Sam Mendes, Empire of Light, is coming out on Dec. 9. The release pattern hasn’t been specified yet. Searchlight went went with Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley before Christmas, and platformed Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch. The drama romance, which he also wrote, is set in and around