Focus Features will open its Sundance Film Festival acquisition Didi on July 26. The movie from Oscar nominee Sean Wang premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where it received critical and audience acclaim, winning both the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award and the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Best Ensemble Cast. Inspired by Wang’s
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The indie box office busted out this year, hitting is stride post-Covid with an eclectic string of releases that made a splash artistically and financially. Independents and mini-majors saw $1.47 billion in box office receipts as of Dec. 27, up from $811.7 million in 2022, according to Comscore. Focus Features had the biggest limited opening
EXCLUSIVE: Focus Feature we hear has set a July 12, 2024 limited theatrical release for Baltasar Kormákur’s romantic-drama, Touch. Universal Pictures International is handling international distribution sans Iceland. The movie is based on the Icelandic best-selling novel by Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson published by Ecco/Harper Collins in the U.S August 2022. The movie follows one widower’s emotional journey to find
New Regency‘s Jeff Nichols movie The Bikeriders, which we were told Focus Features took over from Disney, has set a release date of June 21, 2024. The only other title currently scheduled on that weekend is an untitled movie from Universal. The movie starring Austin Butler, Jodie Comer, Tom Hardy and Norman Reedus, follows the
Focus Features‘ second movie with filmmaker Robert Eggers, Nosferatu, will be hitting cinemas on Wednesday, December 25, 2024. That’s good news for the year-end holiday period, which is still scant of product. The only other wide entries on Dec. 20, 2024 are Disney’s live-action sequel Mufasa and Paramount’s Sonic the Hedgehog 3. “The audacious filmmaking
In a super weekend for specialty, Saltburn had a lofty open on seven screens and The Holdovers a nice $2.7 million in a major week-three expansion that put it at no. 6 at the domestic box office. Actors are once again out promoting their films and indie/original fare continues to benefit from fewer studio releases
Focus Features has set a Jan. 26, 2024 theatrical release date for Goran Stolevski’s latest, Housekeeping For Beginners. It premiered in Venice as part of the official “Orizzonti” (Horizons) competitive section, securing the prestigious Queer Lion Award. See Deadline review. It was selected shortly after as North Macedonia’s international Oscar submission. The film explores the
Theatrical releases continue to be added to the 2024 calendar, which is a very good sign given that we still haven’t seen the shake-up yet from the prolonged SAG-AFTRA strike. Focus Features just dated the horror comedy, Lisa Frankenstein, which was written by Oscar winner Diablo Cody for a Feb. 9, 2024 opening. Also hitting
Big news in specialty this weekend as Asteroid City arrives in theaters with Wes Anderson and his army of fans behind it and a major marketing campaign by Focus Features. The director’s latest opens at six locations in New York and Los Angeles, where Focus has partnered with Landmark for the reopening of Sunset, the
Ethan Coen’s Focus Features and Working Title comedy caper, Drive-Away Dolls, will open on Sept. 22. It won’t be a surprise to see this Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan movie among the lineups of the fall film festival trifecta. Written by Coen and Tricia Cooke, Drive-Away Dolls follows Jamie, an uninhibited free spirit bemoaning yet
Here’s a movie Focus Features is excited about for next awards season, and it wouldn’t be shocking to see it world premiering at a big film festival some time this year: Alexander Payne’s New England prep school comedy The Holdovers. The Universal label just dated the pic for November 10 with a wider break on
Focus Features has set a September 8 global release date for My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3. That will give some breadth to the post-Labor Day box office and an option for older female moviegoers, that weekend already having New Line’s The Nun 2 on the schedule. Part 3 was written and directed by the
Focus Features has dated Wes Anderson’s next movie Asteroid City for June 16, 2023. Do we smell a Cannes selection? Pic will go even wider on June 23. Universal, as previously reported, has overseas. Focus previously teamed with Anderson and Indian Paintbrush on 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom. Asteroid City, written by Anderson based on a story
EXCLUSIVE: On the heels of releasing Goran Stolevski’s feature directorial debut You Won’t Be Alone, Focus Features is re-teaming with the Macedonian-Australian filmmaker on his second feature, Of An Age. Focus has scheduled Of An Age for February 10, 2023, with a national expansion on February 17. Universal has offshore rights sans Australia. Written, directed,
Sight Unseen, Makeready and Hillman Grad Productions’ A Thousand and One will be released in theaters on March 31, 2023 from Focus Features. The pic reps the feature directorial debut of A.V. Rockwell, off a script the filmmaker wrote, which follows unapologetic and free-spirited Inez (Teyana Taylor), who kidnaps six-year-old Terry from the foster care
Film premieres and headlines spilling from a trio of festivals either in full swing (Venice), just starting (Telluride) or queued up (Toronto) have indie exhibitors and distributors the most hopeful since Covid hit that a stream of new films could fire up the arthouse market. Todd Field’s Cate Blanchett-starrer TÁR (debuted to a six-minute standing ovation
A24’s Bodies Bodies Bodies hit theaters with the per-screen average this weekend in a limited opening, and the second best of the year. That record was set last spring with Everything Everywhere All at Once as the indie distributor piles up successes. Halina Reijn’s Gen-Z whodunnit comedy grossed $226,526 on six screens in NY and
Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris grossed $1.35 million in week two with a mix of arthouse and commercial theaters among top ten locations and a nice hold from opening weekend (-31%). Cume to date is $4.65 million for the film starring Leslie Manville as a British housekeeper who dreams of owning a Christian Dior gown. It
Focus Features’ Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris will hit an estimated $1.9 million weekend gross at 980 theaters drawing women with those 55 years of age and older repping 44% of the total. Turnout was best on the coasts for the drama starring Leslie Manville and Isabelle Huppert. That’s a PSA of $1,939 and a
Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris, a kind Cinderella story for older women with a Dior twist, arrives in 978 theaters this weekend with strong reviews and great word of mouth. The film is a known property among that demo given its prime trailer treatment before Focus Features’ fan favorite Downtown Abbey: A New Era —
Focus Features has set a limited theatrical release for Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco on December 2, 2022. The film, directed by Michael Showalter from a screenplay by David Marshall Grant and Dan Savage based on Michael Ausiello’s best-selling memoir, will expand domestically on December 9 and
SUNDAY AM UPDATE: Refresh for more analysis and chart Focus Features’ Downton Abbey: A New Era is coming in at $16M, and while some might snipe that it’s lower than the first one’s robust $31M start, particularly against a production cost that’s double from the first at $40M, keep in mind this is a sequel to period
Highly anticipated Downton Abbey: A New Era made $1.050 million in Thursday previews that began at 7 p.m. at more than 3,300 theaters. It is Focus Features’ widest ever U.S. release and one that comes with a weight of responsibility as the film to finally catapult older demos back into theaters. Focus Features distribution chief
FRIDAY MIDDAY UPDATE: Focus Features sequel Downton Abbey: A New Era is heading toward an $18M opening after a projected $8M Friday that includes $1M in Thursday night previews. That will put the Simon Curtis directed title in second place for the weekend behind Disney’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness which will hold on the No. 1
“I have very little to say except that I think it very charming and kind of you all to give us your Sunday night,” said a disarming Julian Fellowes at the NYC premiere of Downton Abbey: A New Era last Sunday. Distributor Focus Features – and the broader industry — hopes audiences will give the
“We have our own superheroes here at Focus Feature and they are going to bring older filmgoers back to your movie theaters,” Lisa Bunnell, Focus Features distribution chief, promised thousands of cinema execs at Universal’s CinemaCon presentation Wednesday. “They want to see something new. They come,” she said, welcoming the cast of Downton Abbey: A
Focus Features has picked up Of An Age, the second feature by writer/director Goran Stolevski. The announcement comes as the distributor presents the helmer’s debut feature, You Won’t Be Alone — about a witch struggling for human connection in 19th century rural Macedonia — this weekend in limited release. Of An Age is set in the
Focus Features will open their Sundance acquisition Brian and Charles on June 17. The pic, which the Uni label acquired out of this year’s fest, reps Jim Archer’s feature directorial debut. Brian and Charles follows Brian, a lonely inventor in rural Wales, who spends his days building quirky, unconventional contraptions that seldom work. Undeterred by his lack
Focus Features, Peacock, and Monkeypaw Productions have set Sept. 2 as their theatrical day-and-date release date for Honk For Jesus. Save Your Soul. The studios picked up the movie from Daniel Kaluuya’s 59% Productions in early February out of Sundance and made it known that it would go in cinemas and on Uni’s sister streaming service
Focus Features has dated B.J. Novak’s feature directorial debut, Vengeance, for Friday, July 29. The darkly comic thriller follows Ben Manalowitz, a journalist and podcaster who travels from New York City to West Texas to investigate the death of a girl he was hooking up with. The ensemble cast includes Issa Rae, Ashton Kutcher, Boyd Holbrook,