In other Friday newbie news that isn’t The Predator, Lionsgate’s buzzy and well-reviewed A Simple Favor earned a decent-enough $5.92 million on Friday. That positions the Anna Kendrick/Blake Lively/Henry Golding thriller for a $16m 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. Moreover, the reviews were good enough that I imagine the only reason they didn’t debut it as a festival flick is that they didn’t want to get lost in the Oscar shuffle.
Either way, this shows yet again that A) movies about adult women aren’t box office poison and B) Blake Lively 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 now A Simple Favor) have opened over/under $15m on over/under $20m budgets. The last two earned 3.2x multipliers which would give Paul Feig’s A Simple Favor a solid $51m domestic total. This is Kendrick’s first major studio wide-release lead role outside of the Pitch Perfect series and the animated Trolls.
Sony opened White Boy Rick with a relative whimper yesterday. The well-reviewed but not Oscar-hot drama, starring Matthew McConaughey as the father of a kid who becomes an undercover police informant and eventually a major-league drug dealer, earned $3.475 million yesterday. That positions the $30m-budgeted Studio 8 release for a $9.275m debut weekend. That’s not great, especially as there is no guarantee that it’ll leg out during a pretty crowded season. 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.. Moreover, 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) a white kid who fell into the system and B) a young man caught up in the drug trade who was noteworthy mostly because he was white. Whether or not it’s a good movie, we shouldn’t be shocked when it slightly underperforms.
