Welcome to this week's Movie Math, where sadly Chris Hemsworth suffered another box office
blow - despite The Huntsman Winter's War being one of his best performances.
Thankfully his management team can point to yet another discrepancy between a recent movie's
Rotten Tomatoes score and audience scores, but it might be too little too late for Hemsworth
- especially with Ghostbusters as his next flick.
If anyone needed to be in Captain America Civil War, it's Hemsworth, yet one has to
wonder if his string of box office disappointments has even hurt his standing over at Marvel.
Hemsworth is one of the few Avengers not appearing in Civil War, despite Thor playing a crucial
role in the original comic book.
And while we're talking about Marvel, this has also got to hurt Emily Bunt's odds of
being cast as Captain Marvel, as her box office track record is also unfortunate.
Jessica Chastain too could've used a win here, or at least even a solid debut, as she tries
to transition from indie films to blockbusters.
Although, saying she should've been paid as much as Matt Damon for her work in The Martian
surely didn't help either.
Charlize Theron is likely teflon though and deservedly so, still riding high on last year's
Mad Max Fury Road as well as the recent news that she's been cast in Fast and Furious 8.
But perhaps the biggest loser here is live action fairy tales not made by Disney, as
Universal HAD seemed to be the only studio able to compete with Disney after the Mouse
House created the genre with Alice in Wonderland back in 2010 - one of the very first films
to make over a billion dollars.
Fast forward to today and when contrasting Disney's success to other studios, one has
to wonder if other studios should even try to make live action fairy tales, just as other
animation studios had to eventually give up on fairy tales themselves.
Indeed, Warner Brothers just had to push back their own version of The Jungle Book another
year to 2018 in the wake of Disney's mega hit.
Why can't Andy Serkis just make his directorial debut with a different tale?
Well as some of you have pointed out, Serkis actually already filmed all the motion capture
and voice work for the film.
If you were a Warner Bros executive would you cut your losses now, or stay the course?
And don't forget, Disney is fast-tracking The Jungle Book 2 - which will likely come
out sometime around 2018.
Man, sometimes the release schedule seems like a giant chess board!
Meanwhile, Disney dominated the box office once again with The Jungle Book - an incredibly
impressive film that might've felled Winter's War under any circumstances.
See when the first Huntsman movie hit theaters, it was the only live action fairy tale in
theaters and was for weeks to come.
Now Universal finds itself going up against not only another live action fairy tale but
one of the best reviewed movies of the year, there's even Oscar buzz building!
And to make matters worse, Disney's femme and family friendly Alice Through the Looking
Glass is just a month away - although that film could be Disney's first big miss of the
year for a few reasons, including that Fox - post X-Men Days of Future Past and Deadpool
- seems to be on very solid footing with their Marvel films.
Back to The Jungle Book, it's fast climbing the box office charts Mowgli-style, already
the fifth highest grossing film of the year.
That makes Disney and Fox the only two studios with more than one film in the year's top
ten list so far, although China - as a country - four.
FOUR!
Yowza, pretty soon it might matter what Chinese audiences favor more than American audiences
- and interestingly, they're super into Avatar...
Elsewhere in the box office, Zootopia once again boasted the smallest drop - just eighteen
percent in its eighth weekend!
- while the bleeding seems to have finally slowed for Batman v Superman which only dropped
forty percent in its fifth weekend.
Pretty much guaranteed not to join the billion dollar club at this point, all eyes will now
turn to its much anticipated blu-ray which features Zack Snyder's R-Rated Directors Cut
- although Warner Bros has not yet announced a release date.
And another foreign film cracked the top ten, this time Mexico's Compadres - a spanish language
film playing in limited release!
Speaking of limited releases, Tom Hanks managed to will himself into the top ten with his
A Hologram for the King, while apparently Kevin Spacey should ease off of his presidential
gravy train before he runs it dry.
As for this coming weekend, it's likely that The Jungle Book could still be the king of
the box office as most audiences save their money for multiple showings of Captain America
Civil War.
And while Key and Peele aren't expected to match Amy Schumer's big screen debut last
year, they are set to at least be the weekend's biggest new release.
And that's this weekend's box office!
I'm Grace Randolph and we just did some Movie Math!
Thanks for watching, and I hope you'll go Beyond The Trailer for these other top movies...