‘Moonage Daydream’ Rocks On Imax – Specialty Box Office

EXCLUSIVE: One of the most honored documentaries of the year is heading to the very big screen.

Sony Pictures’ Where the Crawdads Sing has crossed the $90 million mark at the domestic box office, showing proof that it’s not just tentpoles that rule the roost on the big screen. The pic hit the mark on its 82nd day of release, Tuesday, after opening on July 15.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Twenty years before “Moonage Daydream” was a sprawling documentary film about David Bowie‘s life and art, it was a massive photo book focusing on his Ziggy Stardust years, with photos by Mick Rock — his exclusive photographer at the time — and an introduction and commentary written by both of them. The limited-edition book was snapped up quickly and for years has fetched horrifying prices on the secondary market. But original publisher Genesis Books — which specializes in such state-of-the-art photography books — is releasing a 20th anniversary edition of the book today (Oct. 4, 2022). Where the film focuses on Bowie’s entire life, the book is entirely about the rise and fall of the Ziggy Stardust character in 1972 and 1973 — “Eighteen months, that’s all it was,” Bowie writes in the book. Alongside over 600 photographs taken by Rock, Bowie’s provides commentary on the creation and proliferation of the character that, in no understatement, changed rock music.

Sarigama Cinemas’ Ponniyin Selvan: Part One crashed the weekend box office at no. 6, looking at $4+ million on 500 screens for a per theater average of $8,260, the biggest of the top ten.

It was a varied offering at the international box office this weekend with newcomers from Hollywood and offshore markets, as well as notable holds, as we inch closer to full-on action later in October. 

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter Hold onto your bucket hats: Sony’s action-thriller “Bullet Train” crossed $100 million at the domestic box office. It’s an impressive milestone (in post-COVID times) for an original movie that doesn’t involve marquee comic book heroes or intergalactic adventures. It helps, of course, that a bankable actor like Brad Pitt stars in the film, as a heavily therapized assassin named Ladybug. “Bullet Train” reached $101 million in domestic ticket sales on Friday, making it only the 14th release this year to hit that benchmark. With another $130 million at the international box office, the film has now earned $231 million in global ticket sales to date.

J. Kim Murphy “Smile” has something grin about this weekend. The creeper is projected to land a $19 million debut from 3,645 locations. It’s a fantastic start for the genre film, which carries a modest $17 million production budget. Compared to other original horror entries this year, Universal’s supernatural kidnap thriller “The Black Phone” kicked off with $23 million while 20th Century Studios’ “Barbarian” opened to $10 million. “Smile” landed a mildly positive “B-” grade through research firm Cinema Score, though such a figure is standard for a horror release. The film has drawn good buzz with solid reviews, scoring a 79% from top critics on review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes. Variety‘s chief film critic Owen Gleiberman praised the film in his review, writing that it “sets up nearly everything — its highly effective creep factor, its well-executed if familiar shock tactics, its interlaced theme of trauma and suicide — before the opening credits.”

SATURDAY AM:Paramount and other studios are calling Smile at a $19M opening. In a deja vu to last weekend with New Line’s Don’t Worry Darling, another genre pic, this R-rated horror film has received a B- CinemaScore and a severe 69%/53% definite recommend on Comscore/Screen Engine’s PostTrak; a standard audience reaction for such fare. We see one studio calling Smile at $20M, and frankly with this audience score, and the front-loaded nature of horror films, only tonight will determine if this goes up. Last weekend, everyone got excited about the initial numbers they were seeing for Don’t Worry Darling, got over their skis and called the weekend at $20M on Saturday AM before it eased to $19.3M by Monday. Smile‘s Friday is $8.2M, which includes Thursday’s $2M previews.

“Smile” is opening on the upper end of pre-release independent projections with $8.2 million earned on Friday from 3,645 locations and an estimated $19 million opening, which would be the third straight weekend that a No. 1 film has earned that amount.

Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream swept up a cool $922,000 at the domestic box office this weekend, while an impressive array of top industry players took Saturday to mull the global future of arthouse film. The real test — of specialty’s core adult audience willingness to return to cinemas — starts this fall, according to execs at the Zurich Summit, an in-person event straddling the Zurich Film Festival.

Forty members of the crew and production team on Olivia Wilde’s new movie Don’t Worry Darling have spoken out to dispute “the absurd gossip” surrounding alleged on-set unrest during the production of the New Line Cinema pic starring Harry Styles, Olivia Pugh and Chris Pine.

Naman Ramachandran Disney’s “See How They Run” occupied the top spot for the second weekend in a row at the U.K. and Ireland box office, with £984,779 ($1.1 million), per numbers released by Comscore. The film now has a total of £2.8 million. In its seventh weekend, Sony’s “Bullet Train,” starring Brad Pitt, collected £325,252 in second place for a total of £10.3 million. In third position with £321,746 was Universal’s “Minions: The Rise Of Gru,” which now has a total of £45.1 million after 12 weekends. Paramount’s Tom Cruise vehicle “Top Gun: Maverick” stormed back into the top five with £320,963 in fourth place. With a total of £82.6 million after 17 weekends, the film is the top grossing film of 2022 in the territory and eighth on the all time chart behind “Avengers: Endgame” (£88.7 million).

https://t.co/0hr3hUTMhgWhen asked by a Twitter user why the movie wasn’t happening, Flanagan responded, “Because of DOCTOR SLEEP’s box office performance, Warner Bros opted not to proceed with it. They control the rights, so that was that.”Because of DOCTOR SLEEP’s box office performance, Warner Bros opted not to proceed with it.

Roy Trakin Brett Morgen’s “Moonage Daydream,” a freewheeling documentary about David Bowie, doesn’t offer a chronology of the life of the late pop icon. Rather it provides a fever dream of sound and vision, with songs torn apart, reimagined and reassembled in ways that reflect its subject’s chameleonic music and art. The doc, out now in IMAX theaters, was a labor of love for Morgen that took four years to assemble and edit. It was another 18 months constructing the ambitious soundtrack, which required the talents of the Oscar-winning “Bohemian Rhapsody” team of Ventura, Calif.-based rerecording mixer Paul Massey (with David Giammarco); London-based supervising sound and music editor John Warhurst and supervising sound editor Nina Hartstone; and Dolby Atmos Music Studios.

At this point, we’ve all seen enough documentaries about 20th-century musical geniuses that the average viewer could direct one in their sleep: archival footage of the greatest-hits performances, behind-the-scenes clips showing the snatches of solitary humanity underneath the currents of history, and some interviews with loved ones and collaborators that go beyond the image to a subject’s vulnerable core. Tried-and-true as the template might be, Brett Morgen also finds it fatally boring, and endeavors to chart a less clear-cut path with his films.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter It’s been proven time and time again that Academy Award attention has little to do with box office glory. Just look at recent winners like “Moonlight,” “The Hurt Locker,” or “CODA,” the first streaming movie to land the Oscar’s top prize, all of which were more beloved than seen, at least by the general public. But during a year in which several commercial movies, including “Top Gun: Maverick” ($1.44 billion globally and counting), “Elvis” ($284 million globally) “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” (scheduled for Nov. 11) and “Avatar: The Way of Water” (scheduled for Dec. 16), look to find themselves in the awards race, film industry analysts believe the box office may play a part in keeping movies from major studios in the conversation.

Zack Sharf “Doctor Sleep” director Mike Flanagan confirmed on Twitter that a planned sequel to his 2019 “The Shining” prequel is officially dead. The filmmaker cited the dismal box office performance of “Doctor Sleep” as the main reason why Warner Bros. isn’t moving forward with a second “The Shining” prequel film, this one focused on the character of Dick Hallorann (played in Stanley Kubrick’s film by Scatman Crothers and in “Doctor Sleep” by Carl Lumbly.” “We were so close,” Flanagan wrote on Twitter about getting the Dick Hallorann movie made. “I’ll always regret this didn’t happen.” Flanagan also shared a fan-made poster for his scrapped second “The Shining” prequel. When asked by one user why his “Doctor Sleep” follow-up wasn’t going to be made, Flanagan responded, “Because of ‘Doctor Sleep’s’ box office performance, Warner Bros. opted not to proceed with it. They control the rights, so that was that.”

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 of new releases

Moonage Daydream, a film about David Bowie, opens with “Hallo Spaceboy,” a deep cut from his 1995 album Outside. It’s clear from the use of this song that Brett Morgen isn’t making a traditional documentary about the Thin White Duke.