In other weekend newbie news that isn’t The Predator, Lionsgate’s buzzy and well-reviewed A Simple Favor earned a solid $16.05 million over its debut weekend. That’s fine for a $20m production that has the potential to be rather leggy. Lionsgate offered one of the more gorgeous and stylish marketing campaigns I’ve seen of late. The Anna Kendrick/Blake Lively/Henry Golding thriller, about a mommy vlogger who plays detective when her glamorous but troubled neighbor/friend disappears, shows yet again that A) movies about adult women aren’t box office poison and B) Blake Lively is a movie star who can open a movie when given the opportunity.
Aside from the barely-released All I See Is You, Lively’s last three flicks (The Age of Adaline, The Shallows and A Simple Favor) have opened over/under $15 million on over/under $20m budgets. The last two earned 3.2x multipliers which would give Paul Feig’s A Simple Favor a solid $51.4m domestic total. This is Kendrick’s first major studio wide-release lead role outside of the Pitch Perfect series and the animated Trolls, which tells you something about industry priorities. As a crowd-pleaser directly targeted at adult women, I’d be shocked if this devilishly entertaining Hitchcockian thriller didn’t leg it out over the next month.
Sony opened White Boy Rick with a relative whimper over the weekend The film played the festival circuit, where it earned solid but not Oscar-hot reviews. The film, starring Matthew McConaughey as the father of a kid who becomes an undercover police informant and eventually a major-league drug dealer, earned $8.8 million over the weekend, which is a not-great 2.55x weekend multiplier. That positions the $30m-budgeted Studio 8 release, if it plays like Free State of Jones, for a $24m finish. Sony is still releasing adult dramas and thrillers into theaters, and it’s up to the audience to show up instead of waiting for Netflix.
To be fair, this project always felt like the perfect example of conventional wisdom thinking. McConaughey is an inconsistent opener outside of the romantic comedy genre. There is a grimly humorous notion about telling a story about the 1980’s crack epidemic and the War on Drugs, but then finding an example of a white kid who fell into the system and who was noteworthy mostly because he was white. Again, whether or not it’s a good movie (through no fault of the studio, I had to miss the press screenings and didn’t have time to see it on Friday), it says something about the industry’s priorities.
