EXCLUSIVE: Blockbuster hits Black Panther and The Woman King have cleared the path for Netflix to succeed with Jada Pinkett Smith-narrated docu-drama African Queens, according to the show’s exec. Premiering this week, African Queens will first tell the story of Queen Njinga of Angola and subsequently Cleopatra in its second season. It is produced by
The Woman King
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.
Paramount’s horror movie Smile struck up $2M in Thursday night previews that started at 7 p.m., a figure that’s just above M. Night Shyamalan’s Old from summer 2021, which did $1.5M in its previews, and just under Universal/Blumhouse’s Black Phone Thursday previews which were $3M in June. Paramount is expecting a high-teens start this weekend,
Saturday AM Update: TriStar/eOne’s The Woman King is coming in higher than expected, with an $18M opening boosted by lively word of mouth off an A+ CinemaScore and a massive 95% positive on Comscore/Screen Engine’s PostTrak. Friday, including $1.7M previews, came in at $6.8M. Comping this Black female epic to previous Hollywood titles was a challenge,
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
The Viola Davis African warrior epic The Woman King —a flashback to the type of historical epics Columbia Pictures has had a long history of notching Oscars with– is looking at a $12M opening this weekend, per Sony, while rivals have it in the $13M-$16M range. While adults made their way back to the box
The winds of change with theatrical and streaming coming out of Covid were top of mind this morning at the TIFF panel for Dialogues: Production & Development which included TriStar President Nicole Brown, Knives Out franchise producer Ram Bergman and White Noise producer Uri Singer. It was an interesting dais: All three are involved with adult-skewing awards bait