Hello everyone,
BOX OFFICE: The disappointing Memorial Day weekend was followed by an even more disappointing first weekend of June. None of the new movie releases made it into the top 10 of the box office. The highest new release was the Crunchyroll/Sony pictures animated release “Haikyuu!! The Dumpster Battle” which was #7 with $3.6 million although it was the 2nd highest movie for per screen average because it was only on approx. 1100 screens. The only other major studio release this weekend was the Walt Disney Pictures release “Young Woman and the Sea” which is only scheduled to play for 2 weeks before it premieres on Disney+. Disney didn’t officially announce the box office for the movie but other people estimate it only made approx. $500 thousand.
The top of the box office was last weeks top movies. “The Garfield Movie” moved up to the #1 position only going down approx. 42% to make $14 million. The #2 movie was last weeks #1 “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” which sank almost 60% to almost $10.79 million. Over the weekend, some people thought the #3 movie “IF” would be the #2 movie for the weekend but in the end it made just under it with $10.5 million. For total box office, “IF” is still ahead with $80 million over 3 weekends, “The Garfield Movie” domestic total is $51.5 million, and “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” is at $49.7 million.
The total domestic box office took a major hit from $101 million (3-day) last weekend to a $66 million total domestic weekend this past weekend. A drop of almost 35% and the lowest the total domestic box office has been since a weekend in mid-April.
WORLDWIDE BOX OFFICE: “The Garfield Movie” hit a total of $100 million in foreign countries last weekend so it’s global total rose to $152 million which is already above the worldwide total for “IF” ($137 million) and makes it to #9 of the top worldwide box office movies for 2024 so far. Also notable is “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” which just reached an international total of almost $200 million and a worldwide total of $567 million.
UNION NEWS: The union didn’t come to any deals with the Area Standards Agreement but, once again, they’re sticking to their schedule and going back to negotiating the Basic Agreement starting today (June 3). They’re still “hopeful” that those discussions will conclude soon so they’ll switch back….again….to the Area Standards Agreement negotiations.
OTHER NEWS:
In the Paramount merger news – At the end of the last week, Skydance sweetened their offer to merge with Paramount Global. I guess it worked because it was announced today that Paramount Global has agreed to a merger with Skydance Media.
The movie that Donald Trump doesn’t want anyone to see (because it’s about his rise to power) – “The Apprentice” – first screened in Cannes a couple weeks ago to fairly positive reviews from most people (except for Trump supporters). Since then the movie has gotten distribution deals in several European countries, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America, and even Canada. It might even have a distribution deal in Russia soon. However, people are still wondering about a US release. Supposedly, some companies are interested in releasing the movie in the US but due to the threats of legal action from Trumps team and a report of one disgruntled financier (who is a Trump supporter), it’s a rough road to getting the movie released domestically although reports say that some parties remain interested.
As I mentioned last week, some of the studios seem to be already looking at the post summer movie releases by releasing the trailers for “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”, “Transformers One”, and “Wicked” recently. Well, in the last week since I mentioned that there have been EVEN MORE trailer releases for post-summer movies such as “Wolfs” starring Brad Pitt and George Clooney (coming out in Sept), the Marvel/Sony movie “Venom The Last Dance” (coming out in Oct), and the animated sequel “Moana 2” (coming out in Nov).
LITTLE BIT OF HUMOR:
The summer camp season is quickly approaching. Although the movie the line is from (“American Pie”) is now 25 years old there still seems to be a lot of children going to summer camp that know what “this one time at band camp” is referring to.
LOS ANGELES FILM REVIEW 