Commercial fortunes of Ben Affleck-directed picture grow, along with awards prospects
A slow session in the US followed the previous week's bump with Paranormal Activity 4. Said horror movie slid three places to fourth in its second weekend and is on course to become the lowest in the franchise (Stateside, that is) by some margin. The story of the weekend was the rise of Argo, which climbed to the top of the pile in its third weekend on release through Warner Bros. Ben Affleck's widely admired directing showcase is making stately progress at the box office and this will give it commercial clout as the awards season moves forward, which never hurts a contender's prospects.
The top 10 contains one other awards hopeful in the form of Cloud Atlas, which Warner Bros launched in third place on $9.4m (£5.9m). This one needs positive word of mouth because as anybody who's read David Mitchell's tome will attest, it's nigh on impossible to encapsulate the plot in a snappy 90-second TV spot. That's probably why the film-makers released that grand, bewildering five-minute trailer before the movie's world premiere at the Toronto International film festival in September.
Directors Tom Tykwer and the so-called Wachowski Starship – the sibling duo behind The Matrix franchise that have morphed from brothers to brother and sister – left out plenty of material from the book and it still clocks in at around two hours 45 minutes. It's worth investing the time. Cloud Atlas is a ridiculously ambitious product of the independent space and first arrived at the Cannes market in 2011, where sales agent Focus Features International touted it to distributors from around the world and it quickly emerged that this was one of four indie projects at the time budgeted at $100m. That's an almost unheard of cost for a non-studio movie but there's no doubt you can see the money on the screen.
Three other new releases spluttered into action. Next best was Silent Hill: Revelation 3D, which opened through Open Road and tied for fifth place with Taken 2 on $8m. It received a critical mauling and let's leave it at that. Paramount opened the comedy Fun Size in 10th place on a miserable $4.1m, while the Gerard Butler surfing drama Chasing Mavericks couldn't even break into the top 10 – distributor Fox had to make do with a dismal $2.2m debut in 13th place. It's brutal out there in US distribution. Audiences are smart, bored and easily distracted by other entertainment platforms.
That said, I'm hoping that two movies prosper next week. The first is Flight, Paramount's big Oscar contender starring Denzel Washington. The drama marks Robert Zemeckis's first return to live-action since he directed Cast Away in 2000. Zemeckis has plied his trade in motion-capture animation for the past decade but he's lost none of his live-action nous. Washington is excellent as a troubled airline pilot whose mid-flight heroics lead to an unwelcome spotlight on his private life. It could go all the way at the Oscars. The other one to watch out for next weekend is Disney's family movie Wreck-It Ralph. Hollywood has been trying to crack an animated movie about video games for years (don't ask me why); you have to have hope it'll be good as the animation contenders for the awards season have been pretty lifeless so far.
North American top 10, 26-28 Oct 2012
1. Argo, $12.4m. Total: $60.8m
2. Hotel Transylvania, $9.5m. Total: $130.4m
3. Cloud Atlas, $9.4m
4. Paranormal Activity 4, $8.7m. Total: $42.6m
=5. Silent Hill: Revelation 3D, $8m
=5. Taken 2, $8m. Total: $117.4m
7. Here Comes the Boom, $5.5m. Total: $30.6m
8. Sinister, $5.07m. Total: $39.5m
9. Alex Cross, $5.05m. Total: $19.4m
10. Fun Size, $4.1m
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2012/oct/29/argo-paranormal-activity-4-cloud-atlas
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