Moviefone Editorial

Tag: straight-outta-compton

  • Michelle Rodriguez Among Presenters at 2015 Student Academy Awards

    Michelle Rodriguez leads a list of Hollywood’s heavy hitters as a presenter at the 2015 Student Academy Awards.The “Fast and Furious” actress will honor a group of budding filmmakers at the 42nd annual ceremony, which recognizes cinematic achievement from student directors. She will be joined by “Straight Outta Compton” star Jason Mitchell, Oscar-winner John Lasseter, and “Big Hero 6” producer-directors Roy Conli, Don Hall and Chris Williams, also Oscar winners.

    “Toy Story” director Lasseter, who will helm the fourth sequel of the Oscar-winning film, has the distinction of being the only two-time Student Academy Award winner for Animation (“Lady and the Lamp,” 1979, and “Nitemare,” 1980; CalArts).

    Acclaimed directors Spike Lee, Pete Docter, Trey Parker and Robert Zemeckis are also previous Student Academy Award winners. The program was established in 1972 to showcase emerging global talent.

    The 15 student champs were selected among a competitive pool of 1,686 films from 282 domestic and 93 international colleges and universities.

    They will be honored with at a fete held Sept. 17 at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills, where the medal placements in gold ($5,000 grant prize), silver ($3,000 grant prize) and bronze ($2,000 grant prize) for categories in animation, alternative, foreign, documentary and narrative will be announced.

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  • ‘War Room’ Ends Box Office Streak for ‘Straight Outta Compton’

    Karen Abercrombie and Priscilla Shirer
    Karen Abercrombie and Priscilla Shirer from “War Room”

    A sleepy Labor Day holiday at the box office gave room for two films to shine — the faith-based “War Room” and the animated Spanish-language movie “Un Gallo con Muchos Huevos” — as “Straight Outta Compton finally bowed out of the top spot.

    Driven by Christian moviegoers, “War Room,” a heartfelt drama about the power of prayer, took first place with $13.4 million in its second week, knocking down “Compton” a couple of notches with $10.8 million for a third-place finish after three weeks, according to estimates Monday.

    Among the new releases, Robert Redford’s “A Walk in Woods” finished second with $10.9 million over the four-day weekend and “The Transporter: Refueled” with Ed Skrein taking over for Jason Statham opened with $9 million for fifth place. “Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation” remained in the top five with $9.4 million for the fourth slot.

    The biggest surprise was the relatively strong opening for “Un Gallo con Muchos Huevos (“A Rooster with Man Eggs”), a big hit in Mexico, that brought in $4.4 million on just 395 screens in the United States, showing the power of the Spanish-language audience.

    “When you can be culturally relevant to a demo, I think there is an audience for this kind of film here,” Paul Presburger, chief executive of distributor Pantelion, tells The Wrap. “That is what Pantelion’s mission is. We don’t compete with action, superhero or even horror pictures. But when we do comedy and family together — and most Latinos go to the movies as a family — we can do very well.”

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  • How ‘War Room’ Defeated ‘Compton’ at the Box Office

    It’s pretty rare for a movie to rise from second place to first at the box office in its second week of release. It’s pretty rare for such a movie to defeat a summer smash that’s topped the chart for three weeks running. And it’s pretty rare for a low-budget, Christian-themed movie with a star-free cast to become the top-grossing film in North America.

    And yet, “War Room” did all three of those things this week. After last weekend’s impressive $11.4 million debut in the No. 2 slot, the film rose to the top spot this weekend with an estimated $9.4 million from Friday to Sunday (and a projected $12.3 million over the four-day holiday weekend). It dethroned previous three-time champ “Straight Outta Compton” (No. 2, with an estimated $8.9 million from Friday to Sunday and $11.2 million over the Labor Day holiday). It also defeated two new wide releases, one starring the iconic Robert Redford in the nature-travelogue milieu he’s best known for, and one installment of a venerable action franchise.

    How did “War Room” achieve this surprise victory? The answers have a lot to do with smart timing and marketing, but even more to do with underserved audiences that mainstream Hollywood either ignores or doesn’t know how to reach.

    It would be easy to dismiss “War Room”‘s success as just a matter of good timing. The Labor Day holiday is typically one of the slowest weekends of the year at the multiplex. Plus, “War Room” seemed fortunate in getting to compete against fairly weak rivals.

    “A Walk in the Woods,” a light comedy-drama starring Redford and Nick Nolte, has a septuagenarian cast and only middling reviews, which can do real damage to the sales for a film whose older target audience still cares what critics think. And “The Transporter Refueled,” the fourth “Transporter” thriller, is the first one in seven years and the first without Jason Statham. (Star Ed Skrein is, well, the opposite of a household name.)
    Even so, the competition may not have been as weak as it appeared. “Compton” was still strong — in fact, it was widely expected to four-peat, and it fell behind “War Room” by just $500,000. “Woods” did better than expected, finishing third with an estimated $8.4 million, well above the $5 to $6 million pundits predicted. “Transporter” finished fifth with an estimated $7.13 million, but that figure is just $20,000 below fourth-place finisher “Rogue Nation,” so it could rise to fourth by the time the final holiday figures are released on Tuesday.

    If “War Room” was fortunate (or shrewd) in its timing, it also benefited from strong marketing and distribution. The $3 million film was produced by the faith-based Affirm label and distributed by TriStar, both arms of major Hollywood studio Sony. The distributor had the savvy — and the muscle — to expand from 1,135 theaters last week to 1,526 this week, so it held the inevitable second-week drop in sales to just 18 percent. (“Compton” dropped 33 percent this weekend.)

    Meanwhile, “Woods” and “Transporter” were both being handled by indie distributors (Broad Green Pictures and EuropaCorp, respectively) that had never done a wide-release campaign before.

    Of course, the main reason “War Room” triumphed wasn’t just that it was smartly rolled out onto more than 1,500 screens, but that it was smartly targeted at the right viewers. By now, we should probably stop being surprised when Christian-themed movies become mainstream hits, but the feat is still striking. It helped that Affirm and TriStar knew how to reach a Christian audience through grass-roots marketing and outreach to individual churches.

    It also helped that the movie was made by director Alex Kendrick, who turned faith-based films “Facing the Giants,’” “Fireproof,” and “Courageous” into modest mainstream hits. So the team behind the film already had the trust of its target audience and experience reaching them through techniques that the mass-market studios are usually too big and lumbering to do well.
    But it also helped that “War Room” has a predominantly African-American cast. Tyler Perry has shown how receptive African-American audiences are to Christian-themed movies made within the black community, but Kendrick is a white filmmaker, working in a Christian-filmmaking mini-industry that’s no more racially diverse than Hollywood in general.

    It’s worth noting that this weekend also saw the successful American launch of “Un Gallo con Muchos Huevos” (“A Rooster with Many Eggs”), a CGI-animated feature from Mexico that debuted in the top 10 (at No. 8) with an estimated $3.4 million. That’s a very good number for a Spanish-language kids’ movie (it earned about the same amount when it opened in Mexico three weeks ago), but it’s also not unprecedented. Its distributor is Pantelion, the Spanish-language division of Lionsgate, which has had similar crossover successes at this late-summer/early-fall season in previous years, including last year’s biopic “Cantinflas” and 2013’s comedy smash “Instructions Not Included,” which earned $44.5 million to become the top-grossing Spanish-language film ever released in the United States and Canada.

    Like “War Room,” “Gallo” offers further proof that there are underserved audiences hungering for movies that respect their cultures, movies that are also universal enough to cross over beyond their target audiences. If the Hollywood studios don’t want to leave money on the table, they just have to figure out how to make such movies and how to sell them in campaigns that don’t require blanketing the continent with superhero toys and fast-food tie-ins.

  • ‘Straight Outta Compton’ Sequel ‘Welcome to Death Row’ Shopped Around

    Death Row Records founder, Marion 'Suge' Knight
    Death Row Records founder, Marion ‘Suge’ Knight

    “Compton” isn’t straight outta material.

    Keeping the momentum of “Straight Outta Compton’s” box office success, another gangsta rap biopic is being shopped around that chronicles the rise and fall of Death Row Records.

    According to The Hollywood Reporter, “Welcome to Death Row,” which features many of the same ’90s rap figures from “Compton,” has Hollywood’s attention. The book and documentary by S. Leigh Savage, who is credited as co-executive producer on “Compton,” will follow the epoch of West Coast rap during the 1990s – a time when Tupac Shakur, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre and Death Row Records svengali Marion “Suge” Knight were engulfed in controversy amid a tumultuous period in rap music, ending with Tupac’s death in 1996.

    Already a Tupac Shakur film is in the works with Carl Franklin slated as director. Actor Marcc Rose, a doppelgänger who portrayed Shakur in “Compton,” was initially attached to the biopic along with John Singleton as director, but the pair exited the project and announced plans to pursue another Shakur film.

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  • Summer Box Office 2015: Winners and Losers

    This weekend, “Straight Outta Compton” enjoyed a three-peat atop the box office chart, easily defeating three new wide releases. Which means that the end of summer is, sadly, finally here. So it’s time to assess what will probably be Hollywood’s most lucrative summer ever. Here are the winners and losers of the season.

    Winner: The Overall Domestic Box Office

    As of Sunday, the total summer take stands at $4.72 billion. That’s up 14 percent from last year at this time, and slightly ahead of the $4.63 billion earned by August 30 of 2013, the previous record-holding summer.

    Loser: Movie Stars

    Arguably, only one of the summer’s top 10 movies (Tom Cruise’s “Mission: Impossible: Rogue Nation”) depended a lot on star power to sell tickets. The rest (including “Jurassic World,” “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” “Minions,” “Pitch Perfect 2,” “Ant-Man,” “Mad Max: Fury Road,” and “Straight Outta Compton”) were sold based on their ensemble casts or their premises. Meanwhile, stars like George Clooney (“Tomorrowland”), Bradley Cooper and Emma Stone (“Aloha”), Mark Wahlberg (“Ted 2”), Adam Sandler (“Pixels”), Channing Tatum (“Magic Mike XXL”), Reese Witherspoon (“Hot Pursuit”), and Meryl Streep (“Ricki and the Flash”) found they weren’t big enough draws to sell tickets to movies that viewers didn’t otherwise care about.

    Winner: Strong Female Characters
    Yes, more overt girl-power movies did well this summer (“Pitch Perfect 2,” “Inside Out”), but so did the ones that wrapped female-empowerment ideas inside more traditionally masculine genre conventions. Think of Charlize Theron’s Furiosa essentially stealing “Mad Max: Fury Road” from its ostensible hero. Or Melissa McCarthy proving she could be a butt-kicking secret agent and not just a buffoon in “Spy.” Or Sandra Bullock’s women-can-be-lovable-supervillains-too performance in “Minions.” Or Amy Schumer, proving that even a woman with a history of self-sabotaging life choices can be a romantic comedy heroine worthy of love in “Trainwreck.” Or spy Rebecca Ferguson, whose character subverts the genre’s “damsel in distress” conventions by saving the hero from peril at least twice in the film, while also operating on the same level as Ethan Hunt in terms of tradecraft. She even takes care to remove her high heels (unlike Bryce Dallas Howard in “Jurassic World”) whenever she engages in action-movie feats.

    Loser: Lazy Feminism

    By which I mean movies that seemed to be empowering to women but were marred by lackluster writing and poor execution. (We’re looking at you, “Hot Pursuit.”) “Magic Mike XXL” was supposed to be eye candy for the female gaze, but unlike the first “Magic Mike,” the story lacked some cohesion, and it was hard to care about the characters. A more cynical pundit might conclude that female-driven movies won’t achieve true parity with male-driven ones until they can be just as lazy and poorly made and still succeed at the box office, the way half-assed guy flicks often do. But it’s actually a good sign that moviegoers have discerning tastes and are forcing filmmakers to up their game.

    Winner: Nostalgia, Especially for DinosaursReboots, remakes, and sequels worked, but only for those projects harkening back to a very specific window in time, from about 1988 to 2001. So, that encompasses “Jurassic World” (essentially a sequel to 1993’s “Jurassic Park” that urged audiences to forget the previous two sequels), “Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation” (best thought of as a continuation of the franchise Tom Cruise launched in 1996, not as a follow-up to the very different 1960s TV spy series), spring holdover “Furious 7” (sequel to a franchise dating back to 2001), and “Straight Outta Compton” (biopic of rappers whose heyday was from 1988-91).

    “Mad Max: Fury Road” seems like an outlier, since it’s the sequel to a series whose last installment came out in 1985, but the movie so thoroughly revised and reinvented the franchise that it seems nostalgia was hardly a factor in its success, unless it’s nostalgia for a pre-CGI era of action filmmaking.

    Loser: Nostalgia for All Other Things

    Movies that tried to resurrect titles from before 1988 — notably, “Vacation” (a near-remake of the 1983 franchise launcher), “Poltergeist” (a remake of the 1982 movie), “Pixels” (inspired by early 1980s video games), and “The Man From UNCLE” (based on a nearly forgotten TV spy series from the 1960s) — failed. So did movies drawing upon more recent fare: “Terminator: Genisys,” “Entourage” (based on the HBO series that launched in 2004), “Fantastic Four” (a reboot of a franchise last launched just 10 years ago, in 2005), and “Hitman: Agent 47” (reboot of a franchise that wasn’t even a hit the first time, in 2007).

    There’s also the curious case of “Tomrorrowland,” which, despite its forward-looking title, was also a nostalgic throwback to the shiny, space-age, Sputnik-era utopian futurism of 1950s sci-fi, “The Jetsons,” and the Disney theme park attraction that gave the movie its title.

    Winner: Jason Blum

    The low-budget horror producer spent about $20 million total to make “Insidious Chapter 3,” “The Gallows,” and “Sinister 2,” but he earned back $165 million worldwide. “The Gallows,” whose reported budget was an absurdly meager $100,000, earned back $38 million around the world, making it the most profitable movie of the summer — and probably the last several years.

    Loser: John Green

    Last summer’s “The Fault in Our Stars” seemed to launch Green as a new one-man young-adult novels-to-movies franchise. But with the Shailene Woodley-free “Paper Towns,” lightning failed to strike twice. Also a flop: faux-John Green, in the form of Sundance hit “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.”

    Winner: The Marvel Cinematic Universe
    The “Avengers” sequel wasn’t as big as the 2012 original, but it was still the second biggest movie of the summer, with $457.5 million domestic and a total of $1.4 billion worldwide. “Ant-Man” was the summer’s seventh-biggest movie, with $169.2 million here and another $196.5 million abroad.

    Loser: Other Marvel

    Fox’s “Fantastic Four” is proof that maybe only Marvel should do Marvel. Apparently, ticketbuyers can smell the difference between Disney’s M.C.U. movies and everybody else’s Marvel pictures.

    Winners: Universal and Disney

    Universal had the summer’s top movie (“Jurassic World,” which grossed $643.1 million at home), four of its top 10 films (the others were “Minions,” “Pitch Perfect 2,” and “Straight Outta Compton”), and six of its top 15 (including “Trainwreck” and even underperformer “Ted 2”). It’s boasted a 28 percent market share this summer, suggesting that more than one out of every four tickets sold went to a Universal movie. No studio has dominated the box office like that since Disney in 1999.

    Disney, of course, had a very good summer as well, with its two Marvel movies, Pixar’s “Inside Out” (the summer’s third biggest movie), and even “Tomorrowland” ending up in the top 15.

    Losers: All Other Studios

    Sony in particular took it on the chin with “Aloha,” “Pixels,” and “Ricki and the Flash.” Paramount had only “Rogue Nation” and “Terminator: Genisys” this summer. Fox succeeded with “Spy,” but stumbled with “Paper Towns,” “Fantastic Four,” and “Hitman: Agent 47.” Warner Bros. boasted top 10 finishers “San Andreas” and “Mad Max: Fury Road,” but also underwhelming “Magic Mike XXL” and duds “Hot Pursuit,” “The Man from UNCLE,” and “Entourage.”

    Winner: Underserved Audiences

    Key to Universal’s success this year has been a strategy of catering not just to young white male ticketbuyers, but to women, older viewers, and ethnically diverse viewers. And there are other underserved demographics also hungering for movies targeted toward them; witness the success of this weekend’s “War Room,” a film for Christian audiences that outperformed expectations by opening in second place with an estimated $11.0 million.

    Loser: Domestic Audiences

    Once again, foreign ticketbuyers saved the bacon of several movies that would have been flops if not for the international box office.

    “Terminator: Genisys” made less than $90 million here, but it earned an astonishing $320.1 million abroad. “Pixels” made just $71 million here, but $114.8 million in other countries. “Magic Mike XXL” grossed $65.8 million in North America, but foreign grosses pushed its worldwide total to a healthy $117.6 million. “Vacation” took in just $55 million here and a total of $81.5 million around the world.

    Even “Fantastic Four,” which eked out just $52.7 million here, took in nearly twice as much overseas, for a planetary total of $146.2 million. So, even those these movies were considered critical and commercial flops here, they all probably earned enough worldwide to generate further sequels. Thanks a lot, rest of the world.
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  • ‘Straight Outta Compton’ Stays No. 1, ‘We Are Your Friends’ Flops

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    “Straight Outta Compton” captured the top spot at the American box office for third straight week and “We Are Your Friends” opened so badly it set a dubious Hollywood record, according to Sunday estimates.

    The faith-based drama “War Room” fared much better, with $11 million, and the Owen Wilson thriller “No Escape”, which got a head start by opening two days earlier on Wednesday, brought in $10.3 million for the five-day release.

    “Straight Outta Compton,” following the rise of N.W.A., has exceeded all expectations by grossing $134.1 million so far.

    The Zac Efron-starring “We Are Your Friends,” by contrast, had the worst opening of all time (not adjusted for inflation) for a new major studio movie in 2,000 or more theaters.

     

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  • ‘Straight Outta Compton’ to Dominate for Third Week

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    The summer will fizzle out at the box office with “Straight Outta Compton” expected to easily dominate for a third straight week to cap off a slow August.

     

    The rap biopic could bring in between $14 million and a little less than $16 million this weekend in American theaters to hold off newcomers “We Are Your Friends” with Zac Efron, the Owen Wilson thriller “No Escape” and the faith-based drama “War Room.”

    “Straight Outta Compton,” following the rise of N.W.A., has already exceeded all expectations by collecting nearly $119 million going into the weekend.

    “It continues to generate conversation and excitement, and it’s continuing to benefit from a very good release date,” Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for Rentrak, tells Variety.

     

    Of the new releases, “War Room” is expected to do the best with about $10 million, while “We Are Your Friends” is expected to go down as a disappointment despite Efron’s huge social media popularity.

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  • Why ‘Straight Outta Compton’ Left These Women Straight Outta the Film

    A little acknowledgment would’ve been nice. But nice doesn’t make for a good story of five hard-core gangster rappers from Compton, which seems to be why one important early chapter in their lives didn’t make it into the biopic “Straight Outta Compton.”

    That would be their involvement with the girl group J.J. Fad, whose success helped pave the way for N.W.A.

    “I think there was a certain image that they wanted to put out there, and I don’t think they wanted us to soften that,” Juana “MC JB” Sperling tells Los Angeles Times of her group’s exclusion in “Straight Outta Compton.” “That’s just my perception, and I don’t know if it’s true or not. The way the story was told was very hard-core, so I’m thinking, there were a couple soft sides, but our presence in it might have been a little too soft.”

    “Straight Outta Compton” follows the true journey of Ice Cube, Dr. Dre (both producers of the film), and NWA’s original lineup, Arabian Prince, DJ Yella, Dr. Dre, Eazy-E and MC Ren, as they formed the platinum-selling hip hop group in 1988 that exposed the gritty horror of their South Central Los Angeles streets. Police brutality, gang violence and the objectification of women were subjects of the music that reflected their life experience.

    But N.W.A.’s success was funded and fueled by the pop-fused hip hop girl group J.J. Fad, which shared with them a label in Ruthless Records, featuring Sterling, Dania “Baby D” Birks and Michelle “Sassy C” Franklin. Their single “Supersonic,” produced by Dr. Dre and DJ Yella with Arabian Prince, became an infectious hit in 1988–crossing electronic, pop, rap and freestyle genres.

    One year later, N.W.A.’s debut album—that shares the same name of its biopic’s title—proved to be a hit too. At the time, N.W.A. and J.J. Fad toured together and considered each other both family and friend. Not that you’d know that if you saw “Straight Out of Compton,” which omits J.J. Fad’s existence.

    As N.W.A.’s star began to rise in 1989 through the early ’90s, Dre and Ruthless Records shifted their attention away from J.J. Fad. With the release of “Straight Outta Compton,” still in theaters, history repeats itself. “I just would like for them to take into consideration, you know, look at us and say, ‘Thanks, girls, after all these years,’” Birks says.

    Though Sterling praises the film and would “see it again and again,” she has a different vision for the drama’s two hour and 30 minute runtime. “It’s just that it would have taken literally two seconds to say our name.”

    See J.J. Fad today:

    J.J. Fad in 2012
    J.J. Fad in 2012
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  • Ice Cube Invites American Hero Anthony Sadler to ‘Straight Outta Compton’ French Premiere

    Ice Cube; Inset: Anthony Sadler
    Ice Cube; Inset: Anthony Sadler

    Meeting the president of France and rubbing shoulders with Ice Cube wasn’t a part of college student Anthony Sadler’s holiday plans.

    “I feel like I’m in a dream,” the 23-year-old says Monday on the red carpet at the French premiere of “Straight Outta Compton.” “I have school next week so I’m trying to settle down.”

    Sadler is one of the American passengers who took part in circumventing an attack by an AK-47-toting gunman on a Paris-bound train. He was on vacation with childhood friends.

    Ice Cube invited Sadler after recognizing him in a Paris restaurant. “Straight Outta Compton” is a biopic based on the rapper-actor’s ’80s-’90s gangster rap group N.W.A.

    For Sadler’s part in subduing the gunman, he was honored with France’s highest award, the Legion d’Honneur medal, by French President Francois Hollande on Monday. He was praised alongside his longtime friends Alek Skarlatos and Spencer Stone, and British businessman Chris Norman, for their team effort in stopping the terror suspect, Ayoub El-Khazzani, a 26-year-old Moroccan.

    “It was a great honor to meet the French president, I never thought that I would be in that position,” Sadler says. “He’s a really nice man and I appreciate everything he did for us. It’s a great honor bestowed upon us and I appreciate that.”

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  • Why ‘Straight Outta Compton,’ Universal Can’t Be Beat at the Box Office

    Nothing can stop “Straight Outta Compton.”

    The N.W.A. biopic smashed expectations last weekend with its $60.2 million debut, and it showed little sign of slowing down this weekend, when it remained on top with an estimated $26.8 million and a ten-day total of $111.5 million. The movie wasn’t hurt by any of the obstacles it faced this week, including the premieres of three new wide releases and several days of bad press over “Compton”‘s airbrushing of N.W.A. co-founder Dr. Dre’s history of abusive behavior toward women.

    Despite all that, the combined total earned by this week’s three newcomers added up to less than what “Compton” earned in its second weekend. “Sinister 2” opened in third place (behind four-week-old “Mission: Impossible: Rogue Nation“) with an estimated $10.6 million. “Hitman: Agent 47” came in fourth with an estimated $8.2 million. And “American Ultra” opened at No. 6 with an estimated $5.5 million.

    Each of these movies opened well below already modest predictions. All probably would have done better if they hadn’t been competing against “Compton.” Still, their failure to draw ticket buyers speaks to some larger lessons — six, in fact — about this summer’s box office:

    1. Late August is Usually a Box Office Dead Zone

    It was hard to look at this weekend’s line-up of new releases and not see it as summer’s last whimper, the last chance for films studios didn’t really expect much from. Certainly, no one opens a movie near the end of August and expects it to make the kind of money that of a May or June release. In recent years, Labor Day weekend has been an “okay” time to release horror movies — only because there’s usually so little to choose from that undemanding horror fans will jump at the chance to see anything scary.

    But that may no longer be true, since…

    2. Horror Is No Longer a Guaranteed Moneymaker

    “Sinister 2” is the latest production from Jason Blum, the producer who’s made a mint from very-low-budget horror in recent years, with successes like “Paranormal Activity” and “Insidious” franchises. The “Sinister” sequel is an attempt to turn the 2012 hit into a similar franchise.

    But that film, at least, had Ethan Hawke as the star; this one had the, um, less prestigious Shannyn Sossamon. Who knows, the movie cost so little to make that Blum will probably make a profit anyway, but even he seems to see the writing on the wall, having diversified over the past year into non-horror fare, including the art-house drama “Whiplash” (which won co-star J.K. Simmons an Oscar) and this month’s thriller “The Gift” (which finished seventh this weekend with an estimated $4.3 million, for a three-week total of $31.1 million. A nice return for a movie that only cost $5 million).

    3. Stop Making Remakes No One Really Wants
    We’re looking at you, “Hitman: Agent 47.”

    This is the second time time Fox has tried to make this movie series happen; like “fetch,” it ain’t gonna happen. The 2007 “Hitman” made just $39.7 million in the U.S., but it made another $60.3 million overseas, for a worldwide total just a hair shy of $100 million. Apparently, that was enough to justify a return to the video game property eight years later.

    Audiences may have short memories, but they have even tighter wallets — especially when the same movie they turned down once before gets waved in their faces a second time.

    4. Kristen Stewart Is Not a Box Office Draw…

    …Except as Bella Swan or Snow White. Kudos to the actress for having quirky indie taste and for reuniting with Jesse Eisenberg, her co-star in the underrated indie “Adventureland,” for the new “American Ultra.” Indeed, it’s admirable that she’s happy to work outside of the realm of would-be blockbusters, especially since the rewards haven’t been that lucrative. In the last 11 years, no movie she’s starred in (except, of course, for the four “Twilight” films and “Snow White and the Huntsman”) has cracked $20 million over its entire domestic run, and seven of her films have earned just $1 million or less.

    So if the filmmakers thought that they’d draw her female Twihard fanbase to “American Ultra” — a stoner action comedy that is pretty much Eisenberg’s movie — just because they cast Stewart as Eisenberg’s love interest, then they were sadly mistaken.

    5. Not All Bad Press Is Bad

    Last week’s smash “Compton” opening brought out of the woodwork a number of women from Dre’s past who noted both his history of violent behavior and the fact that the new movie lionizing Dre almost completely ignored that history.

    By the end of the week, Dre was forced to apologize “to the women I’ve hurt,” and Apple (which paid Dre billions to absorb his Beats empire and make him an Apple Music executive) issued a statement insisting that Dre was a changed man since his N.W.A.days. None of this bad buzz seemed to affect the movie’s audience, which last weekend was evenly divided between men and women and between viewers over and under 30. After all, who’s going to stay home from a movie because of the story it doesn’t tell? Nonetheless, it’s never safe to alienate half your potential audience because…

    6. One Quadrant Isn’t Enough Anymore
    That is, the studios need to stop trying to attract young adult males to the exclusion of everyone else, including young women and older men and women. Look at what’s been this summer’s big success story — indeed, 2015’s big success story — which is Universal’s domination of the marketplace with hits that have earned more than $2 billion since January 1. Not one of these is a comic book movie.

    Some, like “Jurassic World,” are targeted at everybody with a pulse. Some are aimed specifically at women, older and younger (“Fifty Shades of Grey,” “Trainwreck” “Pitch Perfect 2”), some at older men and women (“Unbroken,” which made most of its money in 2015),” and some at younger, ethnically diverse audiences (“Compton,” “Furious 7”). The only movie on the studio’s slate that went primarily after young men, “Ted 2,” was a flop.

    And yet, every studio still thinks young men are the demographic to chase. That’s why they put out “Agent 47” and “American Ultra,” even when “Compton” and “Mission: Impossible” are still strong enough to steal their audiences. At least “Sinister 2” tried to grab older viewers as well as younger women, who are usually horror’s primary audience. And that movie was released by Focus/Gramercy, which is a subdivision of… Universal.

    So again, the question arises: Why is no one but Universal pursuing more than one quadrant? Hollywood may want to find the answer soon, especially if they want Universal’s billion dollar-sized coffers.
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