Discounts, winter promotions, benefit performances and the absence from the roster of now-closed solid earner The Piano Lesson added up to a slide in Broadway box office for the week ending Feb. 5, down about 9% from the previous week to $23,518,702. Total attendance was down only 5% through (to 195,520), with the smaller average
The Phantom of the Open
Chloe Okuno’s feature debut Watcher recorded the biggest opening weekend grosses ever for IFC Films and its IFC Midnight/Shudder label on 764 U.S. screens — also one of the distributor’s widest ever releases. The genre thriller that world premiered at Sundance then SXSW reported an estimated weekend gross of $815,000 and a PSA of $1,067.
“I see nothing happening on a major scale to try to get the older audiences back to theaters,” griped Sony Pictures Classics’ co-president Tom Bernard. Ideally, Bernard wants NATO to trumpet cinema safety in a big public campaign. (A NATO rep says not in the cards.) He’d like that campaign alongside a creative marketing push