The Paper's reporter Cheng Xiaojun
"Spider-Man: Homeless", which has dominated the North American weekend box office for a long time, finally ushered in a strong opponent last weekend. The horror film Scream 5, produced by Paramount Pictures, became the new winner with a weekend box office of $30.6 million and a $20.8 million weekend box office.
New behind-the-scenes creative team creates Scream 5
Scream is a series of horror films that have been popular since the 1990s. The latest fifth part has been exactly twenty-five years since the release of the first part, and it has been ten years since the release of the previous one. Over the course of a quarter of a century, the classic "grimace" image created by screenwriter Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven has long since gone beyond the screen to become a symbol of Western pop culture, and has spawned the "Scary Movie" series, which has been ridiculed and hilarious, and is indeed one of the most well-known horror movie IP in the past few decades.
Scream 5 poster
The story of "Scream 5" continues the previous one, and the three original cast members of Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, and David Arquette have also returned. Since the directors of the first four films, Wes Craven, died in 2015, the main creative team behind this time was replaced by a three-person squad of directors Matt Betinelli-Olpin and Taylor Gillett and screenwriter James Vanderbilt.
The three were about the same age and formed a film-making group called Radio Silence. As early as more than a decade ago, they have been shooting online micro-films together. In the early years, they mainly shot funny short films, which were still new at the time on YouTube, which belonged to the first generation of Internet celebrities. In 2011, Brad Miska, the owner of the film website Bloody Disgusting, invited Radio Silence to participate in the filming of the horror film collection "Deadly Tapes" and "V/H/S" produced by him. A section called "10/31/98" written and acted by themselves was particularly well received by the audience and made the industry start to pay attention to these three young people.
Two years later, the three of them were taken over by Hollywood majors and directed the horror film Devil's Due for 20th Century Fox, but the reviews were average. Fortunately, the filming cost was extremely low, only a mere $7 million, so after the global screening, it got $37 million at the box office, but also made money.
After participating in the filming of the platter film Southbound in 2016, the 2019 release of "Ready or Not" really made mainstream audiences familiar with their names. The film grossed nearly $60 million at the global box office at a cost of $6 million, a model for a low-budget film that cost a hundred bucks, and also allowed Spyglass Media Group, which bought the rights to "Scream" from Miramax, to finally make the decision, and the trio would restart the cash cow.
Unsurprisingly, "Radio Silence" also continued their usual production line of thinking this time, and the production cost of "Scream 5" was only $24 million, which was the least expensive of all the winners who have won the first place in the weekend box office in the past twelve months. Not only did the box office get a hit, but the film's reputation was also passed, and there are currently 75% of professional film critics and 84% of the audience on the film review collection website "Rotten Tomatoes".
Scream 5 currently has a 75% professional critic rating and an 84% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes
The theater is waiting for the arrival of new films
Overall, the total North American box office this weekend was only $73 million, whether it is compared to the $200 million box office in the same weekend of 2015, or the $130 million weekend box office in 2019 in the pre-epidemic period, there is a big gap. Because monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Day, the people of the United States take a day off. In the past, Hollywood companies paid more attention to this three-day long holiday, and often arranged for many new films to be released on a large scale this weekend. But this year, due to the impact of the epidemic, only Paramount's "Scream 5" is left, a new film, and several other films originally planned to be released in this slot have withdrawn from the market because of concerns about the epidemic, such as the new work "Deep Water" directed by erotic film veteran Adrian Lane ("Love You Nine and a Half Weeks", "Peach Deal", "A Tree of Pear Blossoms Pressed Begonias").
Poster of Deep Water
"Deep Water" was actually filmed as early as 2020, and it was also negotiated that Disney's 20th Century Pictures (formerly 20th Century Fox) would be responsible for North American distribution. Due to the epidemic, the release date of the film has been postponed several times, and it was finally set for January 14 this year. But at the end of last year, Disney announced that the film's distribution model would not enter theaters at all, and would instead be broadcast on Hulu and Amazon streaming platforms. In fact, Deep Water starred Ben Affleck and Anna de Armas, who fell in love during the filming of the film and became boyfriend and girlfriend for a year before the two broke up, with Ben Affleck and old love Jennifer Lopez continuing their frontier. With this piece of lace news alone, the topicality and awareness of "Deep Water" should not be low, and it is difficult to say whether if it adheres to the route of theatrical release, it will harvest a wave of box office in mid-January when the new film Liao Liao is rare.
There is also the "Sesame Street Movie" produced by Warner Bros., which was originally scheduled for January 14, just to take over the class of "The Voice of Joy 2", and with the golden sign of "Sesame Street", it is definitely not afraid of the lack of audiences of all sizes. However, Warner also withdrew the original release plan of the film, and it is likely to go directly to the HBO Max online platform. As a result, the Japanese animated film "Dragon and The Freckled Princess", which was released in 1326 theaters across North America last weekend, successfully earned $1.65 million at the weekend box office, ranking sixth in the weekend box office list. This is already a pretty good result for a foreign-language animated film.
The Dragon and the Freckled Princess american version of the poster
In short, the needs of American audiences are still there, especially for young audiences who are not too worried about the epidemic, and state governments have not yet further tightened the epidemic prevention policies of theaters, but major film companies dare not release new films out of various concerns. The fewer new films, the less the audience, and gradually form a vicious circle. But the key is that today's film companies have generally held the magic weapon of streaming media, new films do not enter the theater, they can still find channels to distribute, directly into thousands of households, even if the on-demand revenue obtained is far less than the box office share, but it is better than if a huge amount of publicity costs are invested, and the result is released in theaters but no one goes to see it. And doing so can also lead to the growth of streaming users, which can also be explained to Wall Street and shareholders.
However, the cinema industry, which is already suffering from the epidemic, can be even more bitter. Throughout january, only Universal's gospel film "Redeeming Love," a new film, will be released on a large scale, and movie theaters can only wait silently for the rescue of "The New Batman" in March.
Editor-in-Charge: Zhang Zhe