Industry News
by saidiontheside

saidi’s take – 4/23/2023

Hello everyone,

This email has box office estimated instead of actuals because on Monday I will be at the CinemaCon convention (the annual movie theater convention).

  • The estimates say that “Super Mario Bros Movie” will continue to break records and dominate the box office with an estimated $58 million this weekend.  If the estimates are correct, that will make it the best 3rd weekend box office for ANY animated movie.  Also, with an estimated total of over $430 by the end of this weekend it will be the 3rd highest domestic box office EVER for a Universal release (after “E.T.” and “Jurassic World”).  It would also make the movie the 2nd fastest animated movie to reach $400 million (#1 is “The Incredibles 2” which passed $400 million in 15 days).

In 2nd place, the new release “Evil Dead Rise” is doing better than predicted with an estimated weekend of over $22 million (predicted $15 – $20 million).

  • Worldwide, “Super Mario Bros Movie” is estimated to make over $870 million on its way to being the first movie of 2023 to pass $1 BILLION.  It’s also now the #1 movie of 2023 (so far) in over 30 international countries.
  • Looks like Cannes Film Festival next month will be showing a lot of the great movies coming this year.  It was previously announced that “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” will have its world premiere there and Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” will also be screened.  Now, they have announced that this summer’s Pixar movie “Elementals” will be the closing night screening and Wes Andersons “Asteroid City” will be part of the official competition at the festival (the other movies will not be eligible for an award, they’ll be shown out of competition).
  • Speaking of Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon”, it looks like it will be his 2nd longest movie ever.  It’s announced that the official running time is going to be 3 hours 26 minutes.  His longest movie is “The Irishman” which was 3 hours 29 minutes.  Other than those two movies and “Wolf of Wall Street”, I don’t think he’s made a movie over 3 hours although “Casino” (2 hours 58 minutes), “The Aviator” (2 hours 50 minutes) and “Gangs of New York” (2 hours 47 minutes) were close.
  • Since next week is the final week of April, many news sources are saying it will be week of mass layoffs at Disney in almost every department at Disney.  Disney said last month it was going to layoff approx. 7000 people and the majority people will probably be laid off next week.  Some news sources are calling it a “bloodbath”.

Little bit of humor:

This was supposedly a real headline about the weekend box office for last weekend (April 14-16).   The pope does live at the Vatican in Italy (although he’s not always Italian) and most people think Mario is Italian (although he doesn’t really sound Italian in the new movie).