Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

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domino harvey
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Re: Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

#26 Post by domino harvey » Mon Nov 19, 2018 8:29 pm

For what is supposed to be the crowd pleasing Best Picture shoo-in, they absolutely are

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Re: Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

#27 Post by Ribs » Mon Nov 19, 2018 8:45 pm

Hidden Figures opened to 35% more on the same number of screens. Which puts this on pace to gross... approximately 100 million dollars.

(I don’t think it’ll go that high obviously but the number is plainly acceptable and to be dismal would need to be a quarter what it was - the movie has enough trouble without trying to argue it doesn’t have the commercial gusto for Oscar success)

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Re: Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

#28 Post by Brian C » Mon Nov 19, 2018 9:26 pm

You can't really compare a 25-screen release to a wide release though. For obvious reasons - an anticipated movie playing at only one theater will draw a bigger per screen than if 5 local theaters were playing it.

Like the article says:
Since Labor Day, “Free Solo,” “Boy Erased,” “Beautiful Boy,” “Mid90s,” “Colette,” “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” and “Wildlife” opened better — often much better — on their initial weekends. (“Suspiria” in two theaters almost doubled the approximate $100,000 it will take in.)

...

The $12,520 PTA for the 25 theaters shows itself to be weak in this context. It is behind Fox’s current success “The Hate U Give,” which managed $2,000 more in nine additional theaters (which makes its result more impressive, as PTAs go down usually with additional screens). It is lower than two Fox Searchlight films that were box-office disappointments, “Battle of the Sexes” anf “Hitchcock.” “12 Years a Slave” in 19 theaters managed around $50,000 on its way to a Best Picture win and around $60 million total.

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Re: Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

#29 Post by Ribs » Mon Nov 19, 2018 9:41 pm

I was comparing the limited release of hidden figures to the limited release of Green Book. The PTA means shit if you don’t get audiences on board, and there’s a 0% chance this doesn’t multiply several times the final box office gross of the film with the highest PTA of the year. The point of doing this limited release was so more people would see the movie ahead of full release this weekend - these numbers are more than adequate to help with that.

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Brian C
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Re: Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

#30 Post by Brian C » Mon Nov 19, 2018 10:27 pm

Ribs wrote:
Mon Nov 19, 2018 9:41 pm
I was comparing the limited release of hidden figures to the limited release of Green Book.
I was responding more to knives's earlier post than yours, but your Hidden Figures numbers are all wrong anyway. That film grossed $515,499 on 25 screens compared to $320,429 on 25 screens for Green Book. That means that Hidden Figures grossed 60% more than Green Book and not 35% more.

Your "let's pick an outlier and pretend it's the norm" logic is not very compelling anyway, given the wealth of context for these numbers in the article domino linked to, but if you insist on deploying it, at least do your math properly.

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Re: Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

#31 Post by Ribs » Mon Nov 19, 2018 10:50 pm

It grossed 35% less, I did my number slightly wrong. People are beating up this movie like it’s already Three Billboards. I don’t think dismal is the right read on it and I think Scott Brueggeman of the linked article or any similar professional box office analyst would agree. I do think the movie will end up being a disappointment compared to the insane outlier of Hidden Figures its cited against, but it will still be comfortably in the average middlebrow Oscar contender range of 40-60 million when all’s said and done.

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Re: Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

#32 Post by Brian C » Tue Nov 20, 2018 12:27 am

Now I'm just confused - Three Billboards grossed $54 million domestic, at the high end of the likely range that you quoted (and outdid Green Room's opening anyway).

$40-60 million seems high to me by about a factor of 2. I mean, look at something like Lady Bird last year - after opening on 4 screens, it expanded to 37 in its second weekend and grossed over $1.1 million, a performance that Green Book isn't remotely close to. And still that film only made it to $48 million total despite much better critical ratings and a long Oscar season.

When Moonlight expanded to 36 screens in its second weekend, it went over $800K. Again, way better than Green Book. Still only made it to $27 million total.

Loving expanded from 4 to 46, made $512K, roughly in line with Green Book's per-screen. Made it to $7 million total.

And so on and so on. I think you're drastically overestimating the "average middlebrow Oscar contender" - except for some outliers, $40-60 million is basically the high end of the range, not the trophy movies get for participating.

But ... we shall see. This weekend will basically tell the tale. But one thing is for sure - regardless of whether "dismal" is the right term or not, the movie will need to pick up substantially in order to get to $40-60 million. It is not currently near that pace.

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domino harvey
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Re: Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

#33 Post by domino harvey » Wed Nov 21, 2018 11:08 pm

The family of the real-life man played by Mahershala Ali is not happy with the film

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Re: Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

#34 Post by The Narrator Returns » Thu Nov 22, 2018 12:00 am

I saw this at a free screening, and it's every bit the cloying, scrubbed-clean vision of history it appeared to be. The mismatched-duo parts are passably entertaining on the level of a MadTV sketch, but it has a fifth-grader's understanding of racism and a ridiculous rosy-colored view of its settings (I can hardly believe the cinematographer of 20th Century Women and Green Room shot this, since it looks like a People magazine shoot). I am less than surprised to find out it's not beholden to the truth.

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Re: Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

#35 Post by mfunk9786 » Tue Nov 27, 2018 1:32 pm

From Mark Harris in Vulture: Green Book Flopped. But Who Was It Supposed to Be For?
Mark Harris wrote:Green Book is a but also movie, a both sides movie, and in that, it extends a 50-year-plus tradition of movies that tell a story about American racism that has always been irresistibly appealing, on and offscreen, to that portion of white Americans who see themselves as mediators. They’re the reasonable, non-racist people poised halfway between unrepentant, ineducable racists on one side and, on the other, black people who, in this version of the American narrative, almost always have something to learn themselves.
...
What Green Book may not know is who it’s for. The portion of the white moviegoing audience that needs to be handled with this much care and flattery is getting smaller every year, and the nonwhite audience, at this point, seems justifiably wary of buying a version of someone else’s fantasy that it has been sold many, many times before; besides, it has other options. Underlying the bet that Green Book would be a crowd-pleaser is a long-outdated presupposition about the composition of the crowd — a belief that racism can only be explained to white audiences via a white character, and a concurrent belief that those white audiences are pivotal to the success of any movie. But they’re not. This weekend, two movies directed by black men, Creed II and Widows, made the top ten and handily outgrossed Green Book. While that’s not a common occurrence, it’s no longer a headline-worthy exception — and in a year that also includes Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, and (shortly) Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk, moviegoers in search of black characters no longer need to look over the shoulder of a white director or co-star in order to find them.

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Re: Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

#36 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Wed Nov 28, 2018 10:50 am

Easy question to answer, boomers.

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domino harvey
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Re: Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

#37 Post by domino harvey » Wed Nov 28, 2018 10:59 am

Or Academy Voters, based on responses from Academy screenings

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Re: Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

#38 Post by dustybooks » Wed Nov 28, 2018 11:04 am

Janet Maslin was effusive in her praise for it on Twitter, which I found odd, but I guess she's been outside of the film criticism world for a while.

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Re: Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

#39 Post by Brian C » Wed Nov 28, 2018 11:06 am

Right, it’s pitched squarely at the crowds that made INTOUCHABLES a long-running hit at specialty theatres several years ago.

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domino harvey
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Re: Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

#40 Post by domino harvey » Wed Nov 28, 2018 11:08 am

Though worth remembering that America is one of the few countries where that film wasn't a massive blockbuster (probably more because it was in another language than any other reason, though)

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Re: Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

#41 Post by Brian C » Wed Nov 28, 2018 11:41 am

We’ll find out! The remake with Kevin Hart and Bryan Cranston is out soon, and frankly looks like the movie that Ribs was thinking GREEN BOOK was in box office terms.

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Re: Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

#42 Post by knives » Wed Nov 28, 2018 11:44 am

Guess my suggestion of Steve Carrell was not heeded.

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domino harvey
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Re: Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

#43 Post by domino harvey » Wed Nov 28, 2018 11:48 am

Honestly, if you're gonna remake Intouchables (regardless of whether you should), Cranston and Hart is good casting

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Re: Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

#44 Post by knives » Wed Nov 28, 2018 11:55 am

Oh totally. I'm just surprised they didn't go for the least creative choice in the white guy role.

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Re: Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

#45 Post by Never Cursed » Fri Nov 30, 2018 6:46 pm

This was a pretty Bohemian Rhapsody-esque experience for me - not as obsessed with historical minutiae, but about as cloying. Mortensen and Ali play (admittedly very well) caricatures of figures who were undoubtedly more human and interesting in real life making their way through standard deep-south racism scenarios without much in the way of insight into the South or Ali's attempts to ingratiate himself there. The central friendship is totally one-sided, as Mortensen's character is grotesquely (like, almost on the level of a small child) uncultured and the development of his relationship with Ali is less about the lessons and humanistic understanding that each one learns from the other and more about Ali teaching Mortensen basic life skills. But there are larger problems at work here, chief among them being the fact that the film doesn't even have the courage to commit to its own decisions and themes, a point that I will illustrate with two separate subplots from the film. Time for spoiler tags, I guess, but it's not like any of what I have to say spoils any surprises that the movie has to offer:
SpoilerShow
At one point, the two leads are stopped by the cops for racially-motivated reasons in backwoods Mississippi. After being insulted for his Italian heritage, Mortensen slugs one of the cops, landing them both in jail, where Ali calmly berates him for fucking them both over with his hot-headedness. It's a low-key but effective scene illustrating just how clueless Mortensen is about the realities of the South. But then that message and the credibility of the scene is shattered as Ali makes his one phone call to fucking Bobby Kennedy, who orders the cops to turn them loose. A website tells me that that did indeed happen, but it still irks me from a dramatic perspective - Mortensen doesn't get to learn from his mistakes or anything, they're just resolved in the most facile way possible, through a method totally unavailable to anyone else put in the same place.

The other thing I have to mention is much smaller in scope, but it's crazy that it would even make it into the film. Earlier in the film, the two stop at a convenience store that also sells rocks and crystals for cheap. Mortensen finds a piece of jade near where the rocks are, picks it up, and puts it in his pocket. One of Ali's bandmates sees him do this and informs Ali, who proceeds to dress Mortensen down about the jade until he goes and puts the rock back, which we see happen. Towards the very end of the movie, the two are driving back up north from their final stop and Ali expresses aloud that he wishes he had a "lucky rock" with him, to which Mortensen replies by smiling and PULLING THE ROCK FROM HIS POCKET AND PUTTING IT ON THE DASHBOARD. My jaw dropped at this. It's not like I skipped over another scene with the rock or anything - we don't see it in between those two scenes. Even if I'm partially wrong and the audience is supposed to interpret that Mortensen did not put the rock back from the scene of him putting the rock back, there's still nothing clever about doing the scene in the first place if you don't establish somehow that Mortensen has deceived Ali/the audience.

This is such a basic and amateurish mistake that I can only posit two explanations: either the editor made a mistake and left a scene where Mortensen shows that he still has the rock on the cutting room floor, or as I will now posit, the filmmakers wanted the easy sentimental callback of the rock and the early argument about the rock, but were too lazy to set the rock subplot up properly, so, rather than cutting it, they just left it in the film. And yeah, I realize this is a minor thing to get mad about, but it illustrates perfectly how little of a shit the filmmakers gave about their own movie - this is a movie engineered to make an audience feel cheap and unearned good feelings at the expense of actual drama or, as with this incident, narrative cohesion. Watching this shouldn't have been an aggravating experience, but this is a movie that trips over itself so much in the service of feel-goodery that it sacrifices filmic concepts to do so. Thank God audiences turned up their noses at this dreck Thanksgiving weekend.
EDIT:
SpoilerShow
I might actually be wrong about the rock, which might invalidate some of the more hyperbolic aspects of the spoiler box. Thanks to Brian C for pointing this out; I'll leave the post unedited for posterity
Last edited by Never Cursed on Fri Nov 30, 2018 11:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

#46 Post by Brian C » Fri Nov 30, 2018 7:12 pm

Actually
SpoilerShow
you did miss an earlier scene when we see Tony with the rock and know that he kept it.
I thought this movie was overall less inane than the trailers made it look, but still not anywhere near worthy of the rapturous audience responses we heard so much about coming out of the festival season. It's reasonably effective, and a little bit ham-handed in the way one might expect a Peter Farrelly movie to be, especially in the lead performances which felt uneven to me. I kinda felt like I was watching two gifted actors being directed by a guy who didn't really know what to do with them except "be crowd-pleasing."

But, whatever. As a picture of life in the Jim Crow south it could be a lot worse, and I didn't feel that it's half as self-congratulating as the trailer made it look. It was actually close to interesting at times in the way it portrayed Don's culture shock, being a wealthy, educated black man in the deep south. I wanted to hate this film with every inch of my being after seeing that trailer approximately 300 times, but couldn't do it. There might be a good film in here if made by someone with stronger filmmaking skills and perhaps a little more curiosity about the subject.

I'd give it a shrug-plus.

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Re: Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

#47 Post by Never Cursed » Fri Nov 30, 2018 7:18 pm

Brian C wrote:
Fri Nov 30, 2018 7:12 pm
Actually
SpoilerShow
you did miss an earlier scene when we see Tony with the rock and know that he kept it.
SpoilerShow
Not that I don't believe you (and not that this changes the whole of my argument), but where was this scene? I must have totally missed it.

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Re: Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

#48 Post by Brian C » Fri Nov 30, 2018 7:30 pm

I don't remember exactly. He had it in one of the hotel room scenes.

I mean, it kind of changes your argument.

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Re: Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

#49 Post by Never Cursed » Fri Nov 30, 2018 7:39 pm

Was it just in the background or something, or was there some kind of closeup that I blanked on? Ah well, either way, mea culpa. It's still dumb of the film to fake misdirect, I guess, the audience in such a way with the first scene, and I can't say the film feels any less contemptible knowing I was wrong about this thing in particular


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