‘The Whale’ With Brendan Fraser Makes Its Own Waves In ‘Way Of Water’ Weekend – Specialty Box Office

No surprise here: Walt Disney is the No. 1 studio at the box office, not just worldwide with $4.9 billion, but also domestic with $2 billion and overseas with $2.9 billion. This comes after an initial New Year’s weekend which saw Avatar: The Way of Water overperforming, that pic contributing close to $1 billion abroad. It’s the 7th consecutive year that Disney ahs been No. 1 at the global box office, from 2016-2022.

Sony’s A Man Called Otto began the first phase of a three-step rollout this weekend in an exclusive run at four LA and NY theaters, grossing $60k, for a $15k per screen average, over the three-day weekend. The four-day estimated gross is $75K, or an $18.7k PSA.

New Yorkers braved the cold this weekend for Corsage at two theaters ( IFC Center, Film at Lincoln Center) as Marie Kreutzer’s biopic of Empress Elisabeth of Austria starring Vicky Krieps grossed an estimated $32,000 over the three-day weekend for a robust $16k per screen average.

While theaters are still recovering from the pandemic directly impacting attendance and box office outcomes, there are still really great movies struggling to find audiences outside of streaming and VOD options when they are released in theaters. Some smaller to mid-range pictures, mainly horror, have done better than expected in the shadow of the $100-200 million-dollar budgeted blockbusters that seemingly come out round-year now.

Indonesian movies had racked up close to 55 million admissions in their home market as of December 18, according to local box office analyst Bicara Box Office, overtaking the previous record of 51.9 million admissions set in the pre-pandemic year of 2019. 

Brendan Fraser will receive the Spotlight Award, Actor at the Palm Springs Film Festival’s awards ceremony, taking place in person at the Palm Springs Convention Center on January 5. The award comes in recognition of the actor’s performance in the critically acclaimed A24 drama The Whale from filmmaker Darren Aronofsky.

To say that A24 has deployed an interesting marketing strategy for “The Whale” is an understatement. After a rapturous debut at the Venice Film Festival, where critics were falling over themselves to give the Oscar to Brendan Fraser right then and there, there were months without any new marketing materials for the film.

Hong Chau stole the show as a fierce one-legged Vietnamese activist in Alexander Payne’s 2017 star-packed social satire Downsizing. Now, in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, she’s doing it again: this time she plays Liz, a no-nonsense caregiver who helps reclusive 600-pound English professor Charlie (Brendan Fraser) manage his failing health while he struggles to reconnect with his estranged and thoroughly unlikable teenage daughter (Sadie Sink). As the story unfolds, the unexpected reasons for Liz’s dedication to Charlie are gradually revealed, and Chau’s scene-stealing performance — subtle and heartbreaking — balances the pain of Liz’s loss with a poignant frustration at her own impotence.

Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale from A24 swam to the biggest limited opening of the year in NY and LA this weekend, beating the per screen record set by in late spring by the indie distributor’s Everything, Everywhere All At Once.

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.