A New Zealand-based platform where fans track, review and share lists of movies old and new is an increasingly influential marketing tool for specialty film with budgets tight and audiences harder to reach. Letterboxd, founded as a passion project by Auckland tech entrepreneurs Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow just over a decade ago, recently
specialty film
Sean Baker’s Red Rocket, the highest-profile specialty opening to report numbers this weekend (i.e. not distributed by a streamer) posted a solid $96,953 for a per screen average of $16,158 in six theaters in New York/Los Angeles. Critics are calling the film about a washed up porn star returning to his hostile Texas hometown audacious
A24 presents Red Rocket in six theaters this weekend ahead of a limited expansion in New York and LA, adding Chicago, Austin and San Francisco next weekend with a wider rollout over the holidays to several hundred screens. The dark comedy by Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Tangerine) premiered at Cannes to a five-minute standing ovation
Belfast, Kenneth Branaugh’s intensely personal story of one boy’s childhood in tumultuous late 1960s Northern Ireland, earned an estimated $1.8M in 580 locations this weekend for a PTA of $3,111 – a solid showing for a black-and-white film in a specialty market that’s waging what one distribution exec calls an “an inch-by-inch, week-by-week recovery.” The