During the current worldwide pandemic, movie studios are no longer providing box-office figures because theaters have been shut down around the nation and the world. Because we are less interested in the actual figures themselves and more interested in what people are watching over the weekends, each week we will dive into Most Streamed and Bestseller Lists on Fandango, iTunes, Netflix, and Hulu to pinpoint the weekend’s most watched films.
Believe it or not, next week, movie theaters in much of the country will reopen (although, interestingly, not in New York City or Los Angeles, the two biggest markets in the country). Russell Crowe’s Unhinged will compete with mostly reissues (my theaters are showing Inception, The LEGO Movie, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Departed, The Wedding Singer, The Notebook, and Beetlejuice). It’s unclear how interested anyone will be in returning to theaters for those movies, although I suspect we will see a significant uptick the following weekend for The New Mutants and then the floodgates — such as they are — will fully open on September 3rd with Tenet. We will all have to get used to coronavirus restrictions in theaters, which aren’t so bad for those who like half empty theaters (or 70 percent empty theaters in this case). Movie theaters have reopened in Europe and China without incident, but America has never met a challenge we could not botch, so we’ll see how it goes. I might put on a Hazmat suit and venture out to see Unhinged myself, just so that I can see what it looks like inside a pandemic-era theater.
In the meantime, tickets sales are slowly beginning to climb over in China, as Warner Bros’ 4K 3D restoration of Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone, took in $4.54 million on Friday, which is a new single-day record since the pandemic began. It’s heading for a $13-$14 million weekend, which is not going to set any records, but it’s not bad, either, for a re-issue during a worldwide pandemic. Baby steps.
It’s more exciting than the VOD charts here in America, anyway, where David Ayer’s poorly reviewed Tax Collector (with Shia LaBeouf) leads all films on both Fandango’s VOD chart and the iTunes rental charts. We don’t have exact figures on how many viewers rented it over the weekend, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that it’s not a huge achievement, considering that it only had to beat Pete Davidson’s King of Staten Island on Fandango (which has been out for 8 weeks), and the number two film on iTunes is Homefront, a 2013 James Franco and Jason Statham movie. I have no idea why it has resurfaced, but we have seen some strange films rise to the top of the VOD charts during the course of the pandemic.
In fact, the 1989 John Hughes film, Uncle Buck, is currently in the top 20 on iTunes and Fandango. I’m not entirely sure how that happened, but I am attributing to the Soul Asylum quote: “Nothing attracts a crowd, like a crowd.” In other words, a few people randomly rented Uncle Buck and it entered the iTunes top 100, and other people saw it there and were reminded of how much they loved the movie, so they rented it, too, and it just snowballed until it found its way in the top 20 on a very slow weekend. Someone should probably let these people know that Uncle Buck is currently available on HBO Max.
As for the rest of the VOD charts? It’s the usual array of films we’ve become accustomed to seeing at the top of the charts over the last several weeks and months: Trolls World Tour, King of Staten Island, The Secret: Dare to Dream, The Outpost, and Deep Blue Sea 3. One new entry is The Secret Garden, based on the beloved Frances Hodgson Burnett novel. It’s around #34 on iTunes, but #5 on Fandango. Reviews are mixed (67 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, but a woeful 49 percent audience score).
There haven’t been any more new additions to the other streamers since their last big entries — Hulu (Palm Springs), HBOMax (American Pickle) and Disney+ (Black is King) — but I’d wager a small sum of money on the fact that The Greatest Showman is doing very well on Disney+, having been made available on the streamer this weekend. Meanwhile, if you have HBO Max, note that the Harry Potter movies will be leaving that service on August 25th.
Finally, Netflix features the only major new release this weekend, Jamie Foxx and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Project Power, which is number one on the streaming network. It has decent reviews (62 percent on RT), although audiences are only giving it a 57 percent score, which is not good for an audience score. It feels like the kind of movie that would have opened in theaters in the middle of August. At least now it’s free (with a paid Netflix subscription). At number two is The Lost Husband, a romcom starring Leslie Bibb and Josh Duhamel, which audiences (77 percent) are liking more than critics (60 percent). Old kid flicks, Mr. Peabody and Sherman and Dennis the Menace are at three and five, respectively, while last weekend’s number one film, the Netflix original, Work It, falls to number four.
Don’t expect much next weekend, either, on VOD or the streamers. There’s another Tesla movie, Tesla, starring Ethan Hawke; RZA directs Cut Throat City; and Kevin Wilmmott (co-writer of BlacKkKlansman) directs The 24th, which is about the 24th United States Infantry Regiment and the Houston Riot of 1917.
