Rival studios have spent the summer mocking Sony for backing “The Emoji Movie” with a full-throated marketing campaign, including a stunt at the Cannes Film Festival involving a parasailing actor, confetti and people in emoji costumes. Surely, sniffed the film elite, Sony was delusional if it thought it could make something out of such dreck.
But never underestimate two things — the taste of the American public, to paraphrase H. L. Mencken, and the nag factor. Sony plastered a handful of cities with “Emoji Movie” posters and billboards starting in May, much earlier than is typical, to position the film as a summer event and get children to start pestering their parents to go see it. Sony also spent months dispatching actors in emoji costumes.
Stop by the Sony booth at #WizardWorldPHL to play @EmojiMovie Plinko plus meet Poop, Gene, Hi-5, and Jailbreak! @WizardWorld #EmojiMovie pic.twitter.com/TtralQ8GxG
— Allied Philadelphia (@AlliedIMPhilly) June 2, 2017
“We focused on giving these characters a personality — make them go from an emoji to something dimensionalized you want go on a journey with,” Josh Greenstein, Sony’s president of worldwide marketing and distribution, said by phone on Sunday.
The weekend’s other new wide-release movie was “Atomic Blonde” (Universal), which starred Charlize Theron as a superspy on a violent mission in East Berlin in 1989. Independently financed by Sierra/Affinity for roughly $30 million, “Atomic Blonde” sold about $18.6 million in tickets. That was a solid start for a quirky period film with a plot that many critics found convoluted.
But “Atomic Blonde” was not an art house endeavor. The reaction to Ms. Theron’s performance in film circles had been so euphoric that Universal and its Focus Features label thought the movie had a shot at becoming a new “Bourne Identity,” which arrived to $37.3 million in ticket sales in 2002, after adjusting for inflation. Universal’s main marketing team spent months working to promote it as a crossover hit, comparing Ms. Theron’s character to James Bond.
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Also notable at the weekend box office was the limited release of “Detroit” (Annapurna), Kathryn Bigelow’s look at the 1967 Detroit riot. It took in $365,455 at 20 theaters in nine cities, a result that Annapurna’s president of distribution, Erik Lomis, called “pretty solid.” He added, “We released it early so that we could start the conversation. We’re pleased.”
While certainly solid, the “Detroit” turnout was not sizzling. Ms. Bigelow’s film has received ecstatic reviews over all, but a large part of the conversation so far has focused on the appropriateness of a mostly white filmmaking team tackling such a painful moment in African-American history. “Detroit,” starring John Boyega and Anthony Mackie, arrives nationwide on Friday.
Playing in just four locations over the weekend was the documentary “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power” (Paramount), which revisits Al Gore’s environmental movement. It took in $130,000. “An Inconvenient Truth,” collected $347,520 upon its May 2006 arrival in four theaters, after adjusting for inflation.
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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/30/movies/the-emoji-movie-starts-strong-as-dunkirk-stays-at-no-1.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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