A4’s supernatural horror Talk To Me opens the debut film by Australian brothers and popular YouTubers Danny and Michael Philippou on 2,300 screens. Strong reviews (see Deadline’s here), A24 large built-in fan base and its elevated horror cred saw a Thursday gross of $1.25 million, looking to top a $4-5M weekend. The Sundance-premiering pic follows
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Return To Dust, an arthouse hit in China last summer before being pulled from release, opens Stateside this weekend with Film Movement presenting on two screens – NYC’s BAM Rose Cinema and the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, expanding to LA and Seattle next Friday. The distributor acquired the film directed by Li Ruijun
Expressing solidarity with Hollywood actors on Day 1 of the SAG-AFTRA strike, specialty distributors polled were anxiously juggling opening weekend Q&As and movie premieres without talent. They were trying to clarify which actors on what international productions are SAG-AFTRA, bound by the guild, or neither. And, for those involved in production, trying to pin down
A sci-fi comedy by Mel Eslyn and a literary noir by Alice Troughton – who are, respectively, the longtime producer for the Duplass brothers, and an award-winning UK television director (Dr. Who, Cucumber, The Living And The Dead) — debut in limited release this weekend, alongside Adele Lim’s Joy Ride, a Lionsgate wide-release – marking
A trio of docs and a wider-than-usual run for a Vertical thriller populate a specialty weekend with fewer new openings as theaters stick with Asteroid City and devote screens to Indiana Jones and Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken. Call it jittery Friday as the indie community like the rest of Hollywood awaits news from SAG-AFTRA as
Two of the most successful specialty films of the year expand this weekend and a handful of others jump into an arthouse market that’s seen few new entrants in recent weeks as wide release piled on wide release. Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City jumps from a blockbuster six-theater opening ($800k over three days) last weekend for
Big news in specialty this weekend as Asteroid City arrives in theaters with Wes Anderson and his army of fans behind it and a major marketing campaign by Focus Features. The director’s latest opens at six locations in New York and Los Angeles, where Focus has partnered with Landmark for the reopening of Sunset, the
Two from Magnolia Pictures, the story of an iconic record album design firm back and a sighting of Brian Cox usher in a specialty weekend with smoke clearing over New York City. Acrid plumes from Canadian wildfires have smothered the key arthouse market over the past few days in an unusual air quality event that
A24 follows You Hurt My Feelings last weekend with dual-language romance Past Lives, starting a platform release on four screens in New York and LA including Q&As led by talent who have been champions of the film, including Steve Buscemi, Jodie Turner-Smith and Lulu Wang. Expanding this month. The Sundance premiering pic by Celine Song,
After posting giant per screen numbers at four theaters last weekend, A24’s Beau Is Afraid jumps to 926 for the distributor’s third outing with Ari Aster. It’s a very different film from his horror favorites Hereditary and Midsommar but one the distributor hopes will cement the director’s place as a modern auteur. According to one
Ari Aster, the horror maestro behind Hereditary and Midsommar, is out with Beau Is Afraid on four screens as A24 presents the SXSW-premiering film In LA (AMC Century City and Burbank) and New York (AMC Lincoln Square, Alamo Brooklyn), in Imax on both coasts, followed next week by a regional Imax expansion and into to
Owen Wilson is back, with brushes, as the longtime host of a beloved but fading Burlington, Vermont-based PBS instructional art show. Paint from IFC Films opens on 800+ screens. Public television is always ripe for parody and happens to be a world Wilson knows. His father Robert Wilson helped launch, and ran, Dallas PBS station
As the new crop of 2023 festival favorites roll out, Focus Features presents A Thousand And One in over 900 carefully curated theaters, testing the appetite for specialty fare at a challenging moment. Short film and video director A.V. Rockwell’s feature-length debut stars Teyana Taylor as free-spirited Inez, who kidnaps her six-year-old son Terry from
Much maligned Richard III finally gets the royal treatment in Stephen Frears’ The Lost King as amateur historian Philippa Langley unearths the monarch’s five century-old remains in a parking lot in Leicester, England in 2012. Two books and a documentary later, IFC Films presents the feature film version in 750+ theaters. “It took eight years
Two icons are back in action this weekend as Roadside Attractions presents the comedy Moving On with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin on close to 800 screens, hoping it will connect with female audiences.Focus Features also opens Willem Dafoe-starring Inside from Vasilis Katsoupis on 350+ screens. It’s been relatively quiet on the specialty front. “There’s
Shout! Studios presents The Magic Flute by Florian Zigl, executive produced by Roland Emmerich, at 325 theaters with expansion likely. A reimagining of the Mozart opera, it follows a present-day teen sent from London to the Austrian Alps on singing scholarship at the legendary Mozart boarding school. There, he discovers a century old forgotten passageway
They’re back. RLJE Films presents the Stephen King reboot Children of the Corn by Kurt Wimmer on 500+ screens. It’s a redo of the classic 1984 slasher-horror film about kids possessed by a demonic spirit in a dying cornfield, with bloody, rampaging results. King’s iconic short story features a 12-year-old Nebraska girl who recruits the
Super LTD presents Best International Feature Oscar nominee The Quiet Girl and, as the Academy Awards approach, RRR ramps up again and Navalny returns to theaters for one-week run. Also opening, Aaron Eckhart in Ambush, Charlotte Rampling in Juniper and comedian Jim Gaffigan as the host of a failing children’s science TV show in Linoleum.
The title that saw Riz Ahmed stifle laughter, the press room crack up and Allison Williams murmur “no comment” at Oscar nominations last month hits theaters today as ShortsTV presents Oscar Nominated Short Films at circa 380 locations in 75 markets. The program, three feature-length presentations of the five nominees for Live Action, Animated and
Diverse festival notables from Hannah Ha Ha to The Blue Caftan join a spattering of specialty horror titles led by Consecration, and the U.S. theatrical debut of Gaspar Noé’s controversial Irréversible: Straight Cut. The last is presented by Altered Innocence, whose owner Frank Jaffe spoke with Deadline about why he wanted to give Noe’s unusual
Animated fairy tale The Amazing Maurice voiced by Emilia Clarke, Hugh Laurie, David Thewlish, Gemma Arterton and Himesh Patel, jumps from Sundance to 1,700 screens via Viva Pictures, the distributor’s widest release to date and a big one for any independently produced animated film. And Civil War drama Freedom’s Path starring Gerran Howell, RJ Cyler, and Ewen
Neon and Topic Studios present writer/director Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool at 1,835 theaters in a lively specialty weekend sandwiched between a new crop of Sundance films and noteworthy expansions in the glow of Oscar nominations. Infinity Pool, staring Alexander Skarsgard, Mia Goth, Cleopatra Coleman and Jalil Lespert, had a splashy debut last weekend in the
Sony Pictures Classics present Florian Zeller’s The Son on 554 screens, an emotional family drama that folllows the director’s 2020 Oscar-winning The Father. As with that film, The Son is adapted from Zeller’s own stage play along with Christopher Hampton. Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby, Zen McGrath and Anthony Hopkins star in the cautionary tale of a
Shudder and IFC Midnight are launching microbudget Skinamarink on a not-so-micro 629 screens, giving the viral horror pic a major push after a well-received premiere back at Fantasia-fest that just kept snowballing with strong reviews and social media love. “I was over the moon. For a horror filmmaker in Canada, [Fantasia] is like getting a
Alcarràs, winner of the Golden Bear in Berlin, opens on five screens in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, presented by Mubi; Quiver Distribution releases Candy Land in nine theaters; and Sony’s Tom Hanks-starring A Man Called Otto, UAR’s Women Talking and IFC Films’ Corsage move into moderate expansions as the broader specialty market barrels
Specialty film closes the book on a mixed 2022 this weekend with the limited release by Sony of Tom Hanks-starring A Man Called Otto; a literary doc by Lizzie Gottlieb from Sony Pictures Classics and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest from Neon via Cannes. Otto, by Mark Forster, is a remake of a Swedish film based on
Patti Smith hosted a New York screening of Corsage last week, one of many showings since the Oscar-shortlisted Best International Feature contender premiered to a warm welcome in Cannes, where it won Best Performance, Un Certain Regard, for star Vicky Krieps as the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, Sisi for short. It’s fitting that Smith, royalty
French author and now filmmaker Annie Ernaux is having a year. She was just awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize for literature. Her autobiographical L’Événement was adapted by director Audrey Diwan into the critically acclaimed Happening, released last spring. And this weekend, Kino Lorber presents her directorial debut, The Super 8 Years, at Film at Lincoln Center and DCTV
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
A platoon of titles hits the specialty circuit this weekend, getting in ahead of steamroller Avatar: Way of Water and the year-end deadline for Oscar eligibility. This is a soul-searching, what-lies-ahead moment for a market still much too inconsistent for comfort, but that can be pondered later. At the moment, indie distributors are quite busy