Moviefone Editorial

Tag: a-cure-for-wellness

  • 5 Reasons Why ‘LEGO Batman’ Can’t Be Stopped at the Box Office

    So far, LEGO Batman has been no match for LEGO Chris Pratt. Still, even though “The LEGO Batman Movie” didn’t open as big as it should have, and isn’t raking it in like “The LEGO Movie” did, it was still far and away the box office winner for a second straight weekend.

    Like the brick-built Bruce Wayne, “The LEGO Batman Movie” has been fortunate in its choice of rivals. The three movies that opened wide this weekend didn’t really stand a chance of beating “LEGO Batman,” with its estimated $34.2 million. Nor were they likely to outsell “Fifty Shades Darker” (which whipped up an estimated $21.0 million), even with the sadomasochistic sequel’s loss of 55 percent of the business it earned during last weekend’s premiere. “The Great Wall” and “Fist Fight” didn’t do great, either, while “A Cure for Wellness” did a little worse.

    Why wasn’t the star power of such reliable box office draws as “Great Wall’s” Matt Damon enough to challenge the two star-free top box office draws? It could have to do with the audiences each movie is chasing. For instance, there’s…

    1. The Discerning Audience
    Reviews may not matter much, unless they’re uniformly excellent or horrible. Right now, according to Rotten Tomatoes, “LEGO Batman” has the best reviews (91 percent “Fresh”) of any movie in saturation release (more than 3,000 screens). Then again, “Fifty Shades” has some of the worst reviews (9 percent “Rotten”), which may help explain its steep second-weekend drop.

    Reviews for the three new wide releases are all poor, ranging from 32 to 38 percent fresh. Word-of-mouth is no better, judging by their CinemaScore grades: lackluster B grades for “Great Wall” and “Fist Fight” and a dismal C+ for “Wellness.” No wonder that horror film opened in 10th place with an estimated $4.2 million, even falling short of the low $6 million bar analysts had predicted.

    You’d have thought “Fist Fight” would have been able to muster better than a fifth-place opening, with an estimated $12.0 million. Not only has Cube been a solid draw in recent comedies like the “Ride Along” movies, but “Fist Fight” also had the comedy marketplace all to itself. So it seems clear that the weak reviews and word-of-mouth must have hurt.

    2. The Minority Audience
    There have been a lot of grumblings about whitewashing regarding “The Great Wall” — why does a Chinese-made movie set in ancient China need a white American star? None of these complaints seem to have stopped Asian-American audiences from going to see the historical fantasy adventure, which debuted in third place with an estimated $18.1 million.

    According to exit polls, the “Great Wall” audience was 15 percent Asian, or nearly three times the percentage of Asians among the American populace.

    Interestingly, “Great Wall” also drew an audience that was 23 percent Hispanic, also a higher fraction than the Hispanic percentage among the populace (nearly 18 percent). Is Hollywood underestimating potential sales among Hispanic viewers? Almost certainly.

    After all, this weekend also saw the release of “Everybody Loves Somebody,” a bilingual romantic comedy set largely in Mexico, distributed by Pantelion, the Lionsgate division that’s had several hits in recent years with similar films. “Everybody” debuted at No. 14 with an estimated $1.0 million, even though it played on only 333 screens.

    3. The Young Adult Audience
    “Great Wall” did a better job than “Fist Fight” in cultivating young adult viewers. Some 50 percent of “Great Wall” viewers were under 30. Just 39 percent of “Fist Fight” viewers were under 25, in part because of the film’s R rating.

    4. The Female Audience
    Neither Matt Damon’s monster-slaying adventure nor Ice Cube’s schoolyard brawl proved much of a draw for women, who made up just 41 percent of the “Great Wall” audience and 46 percent of the “Fist Fight” crowd. Most women at the multiplex were probably still lining up to see “Fifty Shades.” That may, in turn, have kept them away from “Wellness,” which, as a horror film, was the new release that should have capitalized the most on the female audience.

    Then again, there have been an awful lot of horror movies over the last two months, so even if “Wellness” had earned positive buzz, a female audience that had had its fill of horror might still have stayed away.

    5. The Foreign Audience
    Maybe the other reason few cared about the casting of “Great Wall” is that they just weren’t interested in a movie that — Damon aside — wasn’t really made with American viewers in mind. In fact, the movie has already earned a stunning $245 million abroad, including $171 million in China alone. No movie since last summer’s “Warcraft” — another effects-driven fantasy adventure that did extremely well everywhere but here — illustrates how little consideration is given to the American audience anymore.

    The film cost a reported $150 million to make, but it’s sold so many tickets overseas that its profitability is assured, no matter how little it sells here.

    “Great Wall” is one of several movies already in 2017 whose foreign earnings make their domestic earnings look like sofa-cushion change, including “Fifty Shades Darker,” “xXx: The Return of Xander Cage,” and “Resident Evil: The Final Chapter.” Even “La La Land” has made more than $200 million abroad, about 1 1/2 times what it’s earned domestically.

    Maybe “Fist Fight” and “Wellness” would have done better if they’d had more Chinese appeal. Or at least no one would care about their lackluster domestic debuts.

  • Box Office: ‘LEGO Batman’ Crushes All Newcomers, ‘Cure for Wellness’ Bombs

    “The LEGO Batman Movie” dominated the North American box office with an estimated $44 million this President’s Day weekend — nearly matching the combined haul of “Fifty Shades Darker” and “The Great Wall.”

    Universal’s second weekend of “Fifty Shades” is heading for $24 million at 3,714 sites and its action-fantasy “The Great Wall” was projected to wind up with $21 million at 3,325 locations for the Friday-Monday period. Lionsgate’s second weekend of “John Wick: Chapter 2” is finishing in a solid fourth place with $19.5 million at 3,113 venues as holdovers propped up the holiday weekend business.

    New Line’s opening of high school comedy “Fist Fight” showed only a modest punch in fifth with around $14 million at 3,185 locations. And Fox’s horror-thriller “A Cure for Wellness” was scaring up a modest $4.9 million at 2,704 screens as it was projected to finish 11th.

    “Fifty Shades Darker” declined about 55 percent from its opening weekend and should finish its second frame with an 11-day total of $93 million.
    Universal’s “The Great Wall” is performing above recent forecasts, which had pegged the film to finish in the $17 million range. Still, the number isn’t particularly impressive, given the $150 million budget for the Legendary production — the most expensive movie ever shot in China.

    Matt Damon stars as a European mercenary joining the fight against monsters during China’s Song Dynasty.

  • What Movies Are Out: Fist Fight, A Cure for Wellness

    A Cure for Wellness
    A Cure for Wellness

    What Movies Are Out – Fist Fight and A Cure for Wellness

    A variety of scares await audiences at the box office this weekend, from Ice Cube‘s menacing glare in the comedy “Fist Fight” to hide-your-eyes shocks in the horror flick “A Cure for Wellness,” and Made in Hollywood has all the behind-the-screen details in this week’s episode.

    On the receiving end of much of Cube’s patented intimidation was costar Charlie Day, who wonders whether the rapper-turned-actor was born with that mean look.

    “You think he came out scowling?” Days jokes to Made in Hollywood reporter Patrick Stinson. “It was intimidating. The stuff that we had to do face-to-face, I had a hard time looking him in the eye and keeping a straight face. But he can just lock own that scowl and stare you down.”

    More movie scares come from “A Cure for Wellness,” described by star Dane DeHaan as “the kind of movie that will have a ton if different reactions. I think it’s the kind of movie that, yes, they’ll be terrified, yeah, they will go on this wild ride.”

    Director Gore Verbinski tells reporter Damaris Diaz where he finds the frights.

    “For something to be scare it has to tap into the: What is it about us? What’s a contemporary fear? Why are we vulnerable to the pharmaceutical industry?” he says.

    And if all goes according to plan, says costar Jason Isaacs, “You’ll go on a journey full of dread and creepiness and fear and surprise and shock, and by the end you’ll have one of those big experiences like a workout.”

    Now in its 12th season and airing every week in syndication across the United States, Made in Hollywood takes you to the set with directors, writers and producers, gives you an inside look at what’s new in theaters and on the home screen, and shows how special effects and tech wizards pull off their complex magic to bring the biggest blockbusters to life. Made In Hollywood is produced and distributed by Connection III Entertainment Corp.

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  • Director Gore Verbinski Had a ‘Cathartic’ Experience Making ‘A Cure for Wellness’

    Gore Verbinski‘s “A Cure for Wellness” (out this weekend) is a bold, visionary horror epic that’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. It’s the kind of gonzo masterpiece that will be studied over and picked apart for years to come, and it’s clear, from almost the opening frame, that it’s a movie that only Verbinski could have made. And beyond it being a new Gore Verbinski movie, it’s a wholly original film –one that has scope and scale and visual complexity. That’s almost unheard of!

    The film follows Lockhart (Dane DeHaan), a young Wall Street operative with questionable moral fiber, who accepts a job from his superiors to retrieve one of the founders of the company, who has been holed up in a mysterious German spa (the founder, Lockhart is told, is necessary for an important company merger). But this spa, as anyone who has seen a trailer for the movie (or looked at its ominous poster) can attest, isn’t quite right … Saying anymore would be downright criminal. But just know that this is a genuinely creepy movie that will stay with you long after you leave the theater.

    I jumped on the phone with Verbinski to talk about the creative rejuvenation “A Cure for Wellness” represented (his last film was the outrageously underrated “The Lone Ranger“), where the idea for the film came from, what his “Bioshock” movie would have been like, and how excited he was to be scaring the hell out of people again.Moviefone: Where did this idea come from?

    Gore Verbinski: Well, Justin Haythe, the writer, and I were walking and talking about different ideas. We’re both fans of the novel by Thomas Mann, “The Magic Mountain.” That was a jumping off point. We were also talking about genre pictures of the ’70s and, in our favorite movies, there was always a sense of the inevitable — like a hidden, unseen force. And what if that was a sickness? What if the narrative is this illness that the protagonist doesn’t know about? It’s the black spot on your X-ray. So it’s the sense that he’s being drawn to this place that maybe has been there, above the clouds, watching mankind from industrial revolution and the advent of personal computers to our obsession with cell phones, and offering a diagnosis. And it evolved from there.

    What were your influences? It seems a lot like an old Vincent Price movie.

    [Laughs] Well, certainly. I’m an [H.P.] Lovecraft fan. We are firmly rooted in the Gothic. But cautiously, because with those movies the curtain closes and you go, “Well, that was then.” Because when movies really creep you out, they tap into some kind of contemporary fear. I think we’re living in an increasingly irrational world. The movie is more prescient now than it was when we made it in 2015. But if you try and tap into some feeling, I like to think the curtain closes, and because we’re diagnosing the modern man if you will, that it resonates when you think about it in a few days.

    There are a lot of unanswered questions in this movie. Do you and Justin know the whole history of the facility and everything?

    Sure, yeah. There’s a whole map. But I think letting it remain slightly enigmatic has value as well. I think, when you watch it the second time, you’ll see that it does add up. We really wanted to say, “OK, there’s this guy and as he gets closer to this place his cell phone stops working and his watch stops.” He’s entering the world of dream logic. It’s not a waking state. If we can get you nibbling at breadcrumbs rather leading you through the narrative, I think you prey upon your motivation to discover. If we just put things close together, it’d be easier to say, “Oh, that’s related to that.” But in a way, things can make sense in a dream.

    It seemed like this movie was an effort to get back to basics, but then it winds up being two-and-a-half hours long and looks like it cost $200 million.

    It’s the same budget as “The Ring,” it’s just that we had a really great tax incentive in Germany. I deferred my fee completely and we don’t have big movie stars, so there’s very little above the line. It’s all going on the screen. We are certainly not risk averse. It’s all up there. Look, if you can stay the right size you can stay mobile. I went to Germany in the winter of 2015 looking for castles and found this one. So it was great for exteriors but the interiors wouldn’t work. On the other side of Germany we found this abandoned hospital that had graffiti all over it and vines. So we tore the vines off and repainted it. So we’re getting a lot of production value from traveling. If you can stay mobile, you can pick up a lot of production value from hitting the road.

    Did you feel creatively reinvigorated by the experience?

    [Laughs] Yeah, this was a reboot. It’s cathartic. I do think that it’s healthy to go to Germany and know nobody. It was a great chance to start over. You just grab a camera and make a movie.

    Was there any pushback from the studio for an original movie of this size?

    Well, the movie was produced by New Regency, which has a distribution deal at Fox. So they’re kind of a mini-major. They were very hands-off. We had a bag that was a quarter full but we had autonomy. So we had to figure it out. That’s the best way to operate if you want to try something different.I was on another set of another movie and your costume designer was saying that this was the weirdest movie she’d ever worked on, which I think you should wear as a badge of honor.

    You know, it’s good to be a little nuts. There’s just something nice about … Like the scariest part for me was on “Pirates 2” when the studio wasn’t nervous anymore. They’re smiling at you and going, “Just doing that thing you’re doing, we love it.” And you just go, “Holy sh*t.” So trying to find the brink of uncertainty. That’s where you want to be. You’ll find it. Certainly “Cure” is way out there on the horizon.

    Are you excited to scare people again?

    Yes. It’s a really great genre, in the sense that, in this case, you’re following Dan’s character as he reluctantly becomes a patient in this place. But really you’re the patient — you’re in the darkened room and we’re using sound and image and composition and performance to slow cook the audience. I think there’s something beautiful in that.

    It seems like the kind of timeless movie that people are going to be watching for a long time.

    It needs to find its core, you know? That’s harder and harder to do these days. We’re out there, we’re finding them, one by one. If it finds its champions, it’ll be OK.

    Can you talk about your composer, Benjamin Wallfisch? He seems to be part of your longtime collaborator Hans Zimmer’s crew. The music in the movie is so great.

    I’d never worked with him on all the movies I’d done with Hans. But I called Hans and said, “I know you’re not going to be able to do this but I don’t want to temp score this movie. I want somebody who is going to be with me for nine months.” That’s clearly going to take Hans out of the running. He recommended Ben and I really liked him. He’s very classically boned. We never put a piece of music against the picture that wasn’t original, which is really liberating. It’s like crack. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially if you’re using a composer’s other work against a movie. It’s inevitable you get close to that temp score. So it was really important to say, “We’re not going to go there.”

    Did you import any of the stuff you were working on for “Bioshock” into the thought process for this?

    You’re not the first person to ask me that, and I’m sure there’s something subliminal. I think most people are reacting to the big isolation tank. I wanted to build something that really felt real. This is a strange meta-science that is happening here. This place is old but it’s also operating in a kind of dream state. I needed the scale and I needed the pressure of all of this water and a place to put a camera and move around. So I went for it. And people said, “Oh, that looks really steampunk” or whatever. But the narrative is so different from “Bioshock.” We’re taking the tranquility and calm and purification of a wellness center and corrupting that, which is something else entirely.

    How cool was your “Bioshock” movie going to be? Just level with me.

    Well, we were going for it. We were going to push it all the way. There’s no half-measures. It was a letdown.

    Is there any chance of it being revived?

    I don’t know. When you’re eight weeks before shooting, that’s right in the transition; you’re no longer the architect, you’re the contractor. It’s like, “Now I just need to make it.” You enter triage mode. Most of the creative thought process takes place up until that moment and then it’s the forces of gravity and physical reality and weather and all of that comes to bear and you move and you dance. Part of me is like, “I made it.” That’s the hardest part. We’d need a new financier willing to take the risk. But it would take a lot of work to get to that point, before you’re ready to bite into it.

    You have a few things on the docket.

    You know that IMDb stuff is so out-of-date. That stuff is just ancient. There’s a few things that have been on the backburner because “Cure” has been all encompassing. I’m not sure which one is going to go yet. I don’t think any of them are on the Internet. That’s so funny. You ask questions and I go, “Where are you getting this? Oh, I should go online.”

    Is there any inclination for you to return to animation?

    Well that’s one of the back-burner projects that is hopefully going to get going. You’ll be the first to know. But I’m excited about doing animation again.

    “A Cure for Wellness” is out this Friday.

  • ‘A Cure for Wellness’: Gore Verbinski, Dane DeHaan Reveal First 35 Minutes of the Movie

    Dane DeHaan in A CURE FOR WELLNESS“It’s gonna f*ck you up.” That’s how director Gore Verbinski teased “A Cure for Wellness” to a theater full of press in New York City earlier this month. “We want to do what ‘Jaws’ did to a day at the beach for the health spa.”

    Much was still unknown about the horror-thriller when the first preview debuted, except for a basic premise: Dane DeHaan, who co-leads Luc Besson’s “Valerian and The City of a Thousand Planets,” plays a young executive sent to retrieve his company’s CEO from a mysterious wellness center in the Swiss Alps. Once he arrives, it becomes impossible to leave as he begins to unravel the secrets of the unique treatment and the curious illness that seems to be holding all the patients hostage.

    More answers to the plot of this tale were revealed at the Fox Showcase event, which previewed a few of the studio’s films coming in 2017. In addition to a brand-new trailer, which you can watch for yourself below, attendees viewed the first 35 minutes of the film, which comes across as Verbinski’s take on “Shutter Island.”The film begins with the death of an executive. He’s working frantically at his desk, long after everyone else has left for home, when he clutches his chest in pain. When the feeling persists, he goes to get a drink of water, but that seems to exacerbate the symptoms and he falls to the floor — dead.

    Cut to DeHaan’s Mr. Lockhart, who himself is typing furiously away in a spreadsheet while sitting on a train heading for the Alps and bossing a subordinate on the phone. Present and past blend in flashback as the screen is peppered with striking imagery, highlighting the artistry of cinematographer Bojan Bazelli.

    Lockhart was called in by his bosses at his financial firm. Thinking he’d be congratulated on his recent success, he’s instead called out for his nefarious dealings that could put the entire company at fault. Lucky for him, he’s quick to recognize they have a bigger fish to fry: Mr. Pembroke, their CEO, fled to a wellness center and left behind a letter with a message about a sickness in all of them. Believing him to be unhinged, the executives wants Lockhart to retrieve him so they can put the blame on Pembroke, leaving a spot for him to rise in the ranks.

    As he heads closer to the center, which is deep into the wild of the Alps, we see another flash of his mother, who dies and leaves him alone without a family — meaning, there’s no one who’ll come to check up on him. Lockhart learns from his driver that the center doesn’t have a peaceful relationship with the neighboring town, which seems to view the patients as “wealthy people” who have “wealthy problems.”

    The center itself seems cultish. Verbinksi shot the scenes at a real location called Hohenzollern Castle, in Germany, which stands as a nod to Dracula’s Transylvanian lair. DeHaan further noted how the director wanted him to watch films like “The Shining,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” and “The Tenant” to get into the mood he was trying to achieve.

    The patients are much older and treating the spa as a retreat. Reality begins to blur with more bold imagery — the eye of a deer head hanging on the wall reflects DeHaan’s conversation with one of the facility’s doctors, the spiral staircases and ocular architecture play with perspective, and Lockhart falls into hallucinations as he stumbles through the steam room.

    It all seems to come back to the water. The center specializes in hydrotherapy, and even the doctors are known to consume droplets of something out of vials. When Lockhart is unable to see Pembroke upon arrival, he has his driver take him to his hotel, but along the way a deer runs out in the street and causes the car to tumble down the mountainside.

    “My arm popped out of its socket, real quick, and then popped back in,” DeHaan revealed of that scene, adding, “I just said, ‘You have to use that take.’” And Verbinski did.

    Lockhart wakes up days later in a hospital bed at the center, his leg wrapped in a cast. The head of the spa, played by Jason Isaacs, says he notified his work and they all agree he should recuperate here. There were other, more subtle clues that suggest Lockhart won’t be leaving anytime soon, but the biggest question is what’s in the water?

    After Lockhart takes a drink in his hospital room, he plucks something from the glass: it’s a small, wormy spec — and it’s moving.

    The footage, though intriguing, offers some healthy skepticism. The frame work and cinematography are both gorgeous to bold and foreboding of worse things to come, but some of the hints at what’s to come seem obvious and the resemblance in story to “Shutter Island” are difficult to ignore. At the end of the day, the presentation did it’s job: our interest is piqued.

    “A Cure for Wellness” hits theaters February 17, 2017.