Yes The Master ($12m) peaked on its five-screen debut, but film fans outside of NY or LA got to see these films in a first run theater soon after their platform debuts.Īnd that, I would argue, is the victory. A24 successfully turned a Harmony Korine exploitation drama, Spring Breakers, into something of a mainstream hit ($14 million) last year partially by taking it onto 1,400 screens right when the buzz was hottest. Weinstein Company released Fruitvale Station in 1,000 screens, if only for a weekend or two. While Millennium Entertainment deserved credit for keeping Bernie in limited release all summer long in 2012, earning $9m despite never playing on more than 332 screens, it stands to reason that the Jack Black/Shirley MacClaine/Matthew McConaughey comedy would have been considered a top-shelf first-run theatrical attraction a decade ago.įocus Features ( The Place Beyond the Pines, The Moonrise Kingdom, etc.) and Fox Searchlight ( The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, etc.) has had a strong track record with successfully expanding artier, yet still arguably mainstream features, to relative box office success. Short Term 12 never made it past 75 screens despite being universally hailed as one of the year's best films. I'd argue A24 waited too long to expand the much-buzzed about Miles Teller/Shailene Woodley drama The Spectacular Now, waiting until its seventh week of release to reach even 700 screens (cue $6.8 million gross). We spent so much time declaring Margin Call a victory for the newly emerging Video On Demand format in late 2011 that we barely stopped to notice that an all-star drama (Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons, Demi Moore, etc.) about a topical subject (the financial crash of 2008) wasn't considered worthy of a mainstream theatrical release. And what are we to make of the fact that a mainstream, star-filled (Julianne Moore, Annette Bening, Mark Ruffalo) romantic comedy like Focus Features's The Kids Are Alright was considered an art house film in 2010 that had to earn $20m the hard way?Įvery year we get at least a few seemingly mainstream films that never seem to end up expanding to what one would consider a wide release.

But the notion of what constitutes a first run wide release theatrical picture seems to grow slimmer and slimmer each year in as more would-be blockbusters take up more 2D, 3D, and IMAX auditoriums in even the largest multiplexes. Much of this comes down to what studio handles a given film, but the fact remains that films which would have been mainstream releases 10-15 years ago are now considered glorified art house pictures. Whether a delightful comedy like Cedar Rapids could have far surpassed its $6 million gross with a conventional release, whether Lionsgate bungled the semi-wide release of The Perks of Being A Wallflower ($17m) after a $57,000 per-screen four-screen debut, or how much Focus Features spent on their $9m and $13m debut weekends for The Debt and The American respectfully, is a matter for discussion of course.

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