For the fourth weekend in a row, a film with blockbuster ambition has arrived at the top of the UK box office, with War for the Planet of the Apes landing in the wake of Spider-Man: Homecoming (5 July), Despicable Me 3 (30 June) and Transformers: The Last Knight (22 June). The latest Apes film has begun with a solid £5.22m, and £7.20m including previews for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
The numbers may be a tad disappointing to backers Fox, because franchise predecessor Dawn of the Planet of the Apes began in July 2014 with £7.10m from four days, plus £1.61m from a single day of previews. War has taken less in six days (£7.20m) than Dawn did in those four (£8.71m).
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, with a total of £32.7m in the UK, was the fifth biggest hit of 2014 – a year notably light on major box-office winners. Its total was an impressive 4.6 times its opening weekend number, indicating strong audience satisfaction and powerful word of mouth. Fox will be hoping that War can achieve a similar feat of sustaining in the current market, although the competitive environment looks discouraging – the much-buzzed Dunkirk, by director Christopher Nolan, arrives on Friday.
The family battle: Despicable Me 3 v Cars 3
Given that the previous Cars films provided two of the three worst results in the UK for Pixar (beating only commercial minnow The Good Dinosaur among the Pixar canon), it might be a surprise to see a third Cars movie racing out of the starting grid. Was the market truly crying out for this? The franchise has been reasonably successful globally, with Cars 2 scoring well in Japan, Mexico, Russia and Brazil. More pertinently, the series is Pixar’s jewel in the crown for consumer products, with massive sales for toys, sleepwear, costumes, underwear, backpacks, luggage, stationery and toolbox play sets. Box office is almost incidental to the value of the Lightning McQueen brand.
Cars 3 has opened in the UK with a soft £2.63m, which compares with £3.54m for the start of Cars 2 just under six years ago. The original Cars began in 2006 with £2.67m. Disney points out that most schools in the UK have yet to break up for the summer holiday.
Meanwhile, Illumination Entertainment’s Despicable Me 3 does not appear to have been held back by its release during a non-holiday period. Despite competition from Cars 3, the Universal release fell by only 27% at the weekend, the smallest decline of any film in the Top 10. Its gross of £3.84m was more in its third weekend than Cars 3 managed for its debut session. Its total after 17 days is a nifty £25.6m, with the school summer holiday ahead of it.
The indie challenger: The Beguiled
Six films into her writing and directing career, Sofia Coppola has established herself as a recognised film-maker without having achieved much consistent commercial success: 2003’s Lost in Translation ($120m worldwide) remains by far her biggest hit. The genre-inflected The Beguiled, with a cast led by Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst and Elle Fanning, offered commercial potential, and UK distributor Universal pushed it out into an ambitious 250 multiplexes and indie venues.
The result: a respectable £388,000, or £415,000 including previews. Previous effort The Bling Ring (2013) began in the UK with £141,000 from 65 sites, on its way to a total of £628,000. Predecessor Somewhere (2010) maxed out at £495,000.
Nicole Kidman in The Beguiled. Photograph: Ben Rothstein/Focus Features
The market
For only the second time since April, four films took more than £2m at the weekend: War for the Planet of the Apes, Despicable Me 3, Spider-Man: Homecoming and Cars 3. Early in the year a number of titles regularly perform strongly at the same time, then the market tends to get polarised as spring gives way to summer. A greater spread of wealth increased box office 8% on the previous weekend, and 17% on the equivalent frame from 2016, when Ghostbusters and Ice Age: Collision Course landed in the top two places of the chart.
Next week: Dunkirk, which currently has an astonishing 9.6/10 IMDb user rating and a 97% MetaCritic score.
Forty-seven-year-old Will Smith and 26-year-old Margot Robbie in David Ayer's Suicide SquadCREDIT: WARNER BROS.
Over 40, had enough of the day job and thinking of turning it all in to be a superhero –or a super-villain? There’s good news in store… if you happen to be a man.
The mean average age of the six cast members playing the male villains in David Ayer’s Suicide Squad, an adaptation of the DC comic books, is 41.6 years.
Lead actor Will Smith, who plays skilled marksman Deadshot, is 47. Jared Leto (who plays The Joker) is 44; Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Killer Croc) is 48; Adam Beach (Slipknot) is 43 and Jay Hernandez (El Diablo) is 38, while Jai Courtney (Boomerang) is the baby of the bunch at just 30.
Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje in Suicide Squad
If you happen to be a 40-plus female, however, it’s probably best to stick to the daily grind and put away your comic book-inspired dreams. The average age of the actresses playing the three female villains in Suicide Squad – Margot Robbie, Karen Fukuhara and Cara Delevingne – is just 24.3.
Robbie, who plays former psychiatrist Harley Quinn, is 26; newcomer Fukuhara, who plays Katana, is 24, and Cara Delevingne (June Moone/Enchantress) is 23.
Of course, if you’ve visited a cinema at any point in the last 10 years, you’re probably not entirely shocked by the averages above (cunningly worked out by us with a little help from an online calculator).
Cara Delevingne as Enchatress in Suicide Squad
In Hollywood, exciting roles for older actresses are roughly equivalent to a Snorlax or Porygon in Pokémon Go: not impossible to find, but definitely worth celebrating when one crops up.
It’s also extremely common for women to share the screen with older male co-stars. Robbie, for instance, can currently be seen in Tarzan, playing the wife of the title character – who is played by 39-year-old actor Alexander Skarsgård.
And in Marvel’s latest ensemble movie, Captain America: Civil War, 31-year-old Scarlett Johansson and 27-year-old Elizabeth Olsen are the only female members of a superhero line-up that also includes Chris Evans, 35, Robert Downey Jr, 51, and Jeremy Renner and Paul Bettany, both 45. The presence of absent Avenger Chris Hemsworth, who is 32, would have evened things up, but only slightly (and let’s not forget that fellow absent Avenger Mark Ruffalo is 48). Factor in the film’s other male superheroes, played by Andrew Mackie, 37, Don Cheadle, 51, Chadwick Boseman, 39, Paul Rudd, 37 and Tom Holland, 20, and you end up with a mean of 40. The mean age of the (two) female superheroes is 29.
Captain America: Civil War
Take a look at some forthcoming Marvel titles and the future doesn’t seem all that rosy for older actresses either. Benedict Cumberbatch, who is 40, will be playing the lead in Marvel’s Doctor Strange later this year, while Boseman will be starring in the studio’s Black Panther in 2017. But Marvel only has one female-led superhero movie planned as part of its phase three line-up of movies – and it’s Captain Marvel, starring 26-year-old Brie Larson.
Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and Brie Larson at the 2016 San Diego Comic-ConCREDIT: GETTY
Refreshingly Gal Gadot, who plays Wonder Woman in Warner Brothers’s DC movies (including her own forthcoming standalone movie), won’t be the youngest member of the 2017 Justice League line-up. The 32-year-old will be starring alongside 33-year-old Henry Cavill, 43-year-old Ben Affleck (whose Batman is also in Suicide Squad), 36-year-old Jason Momoa, 23-year-old Ezra Miller and 27-year-old Ray Fisher.
But it’s still clear that, while modern comic book movies offer leading roles to men of all ages, only women under the age of 40 need apply for superhero positions.
In fact, out of all the current ensemble franchises, only Guardians of the Galaxy has a woman anywhere near the big four-zero as part of its core line-up (Zoe Saldana, who will reprise her role of Gamora in James Gunn’s planned sequel, is now 38).
True, Marvel did cast 55-year-old Tilda Swinton in Doctor Strange (fittingly enough, her character is called the “Ancient One”). Fifty-year-old Viola Davis, meanwhile, has a fairly meaty part in Suicide Squad, playing “badass” government official Amanda Waller, the brains behind the squad.
Viola Davis in Suicide Squad
But why can’t film producers imagine women like Davis starring alongside Smith (who is only three years her junior) as part of a flamboyant super-villain line-up, and taking on a role equivalent to those played by Robbie or Fukuhara?
When asked about the way Suicide Squad’s costume choices sexualise the younger female cast members, in an interview with Collider,director Ayer even joked about putting Waller into a revealing costume, implicitly suggesting that such a thing would be both unlikely and/or ludicrous.
“I just wanted to see Waller in a bikini. I mean really that drove everything for me,” he said, when asked by the website’s Adam Chitwood why he chose to clad his female villains in a selection of midriff-baring/everything-baring numbers. (You can read the full interview here.)
Will Smith and Margot Robbie in Suicide Squad
“For me it’s, if you look at the aesthetic of comic books and you look at how the imagery of it and sort of what it means and what it drives, you have these hyper-masculine men and you have these very feminine women,” he added.
“I don’t think that it’s a contradiction to say that a woman can be traditionally attractive and feminine and very strong and a very tight dame, very aggressive. So I think that’s something you build into the characters and I think it’s also just, I think it’s a trope of the genre.”
As yet, no-one’s asked Ayer – or any of the filmmakers behind the latest batch of superhero movies – whether “attractive and feminine and very strong” is necessarily equivalent to “under 40”.
Perhaps it’s time someone did.
SUICIDE SQUAD Final Comic-Con Trailer (2016)Play!04:04
The rebooted “Ghostbusters,” starring Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon as an all-female squad of ectoplasm fighters, sold $46 million worth of tickets in North America over the weekend, making it the second-best earning film behind “The Secret Life of Pets.” But even before any tickets had been sold, “Ghostbusters” was already surely the most argued-about movie of the year, attacked by angry male fans on the internet and hailed as a new milestone in Hollywood diversity. Wesley Morris, critic at large for The New York Times, joins its chief film critics Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott to survey the state of the debate now that people have actually seen the movie. The discussion may include spoilers.
From left, Leslie Jones, Melissa McCarthy, the director Paul Feig, Kristen Wiig and Kate McKinnon on the set of “Ghostbusters.”CreditHopper Stone/Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures Releasing
A. O. SCOTT The pre-emptive backlash was another of those reactionary anti-feminist boy-tantrums that have become a fixture of our culture and our politics lately. The wounded man-children will keep on whining about their ruined childhoods, but meanwhile the debate has moved in other directions. The movie’s feminist bona fides have been questioned, notably by Alyssa Rosenberg in The Washington Post, who wrote that she was “more dismayed by the idea that the uproar around ‘Ghostbusters’ has pushed feminists into championing Paul Feig’s remake” than by the misogynist outrage over the all-female cast.
And why is Leslie Jones’s character, the only nonwhite Ghostbuster, also the only nonscientist?
I have to say it makes me very happy when big commercial movies provoke serious political arguments, but before we dive into that particular fray I want to make a few statements I trust will not be terribly controversial. 1) Kate McKinnon should be in every movie from now on. 2) The new “Ghostbusters” is like the old “Ghostbusters” in that it gives comic performers who gained popularity on television and in more provocative projects a chance to widen their appeal and increase their earning potential with a mainstream action-comedy. 3) The old “Ghostbusters” isn’t that great to begin with.
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Kate McKinnon in “Ghostbusters.”CreditHopper Stone/Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures Releasing
WESLEY MORRIS You’re right on all counts. Kate McKinnon joins my personal Taraji P. Henson/Emma Stone “more, please forever” club. But the politics around this movie have nothing to do with the politics in this movie, of which, to Mr. Feig’s credit, there isn’t very much. His “Ghostbusters” isn’t defensive so much as pro forma and strangely sedate compared with the original movie and to what else these women can do (and have done). My favorite moments involved the characters being let off their leashes, like when Kristen Wiig is running around New York trying to tell the mayor and whoever else won’t listen that terror is afoot. That’s a great mode for her.
As for Ms. Jones’s given occupation as a transit worker, it leaves me, once again, annoyed by the optics. If the other Ghostbusters were, say, Ms. Henson, Jada Pinkett Smith and Gabourey Sidibe as the scientists, and Ms. Jones’s Patty was still the subway worker, who’d care? But under the circumstances, it just seems like the same questionable, stay-in-your-place choice that movies have always made for black performers — and an excuse for the plot to ride the subway. But, look: She’s an equal member of the team and black people work in public transit. Politics!
What do we make of the movie’s fetishization of Chris Hemsworth? He’s very funny as himbo man-meat. But somebody involved with this movie clearly thinks he’s utterly captivating — or politically necessary, too. A lot of the plot hinges on him being against-type funny. And I actually found the comedic material to be there for him in a way it wasn’t for almost everyone else, especially Melissa McCarthy, who, maybe, shouldn’t be a straight man after all. I wanted gonzo from this movie and got dutiful. What’s wrong with me?
MANOHLA DARGIS Gonzo is tough to find in the current big-studio landscape, which is radically different from what it was when the first movie opened in 1984. Given this, I think the new “Ghostbusters” succeeds on its own fairly narrow commercial mainstream terms, but with some dividends, including a pretty, ditsy secretary (Mr. Hemsworth) and the new Bill Murray (our collective crush, Ms. McKinnon). The only thing I would add is that Ms. McCarthy was already a significant box-office draw in 2014 when Mr. Feig tweeted that he was making an all-female “Ghostbusters.” Oh, and one more thought: The most interesting thing about the reboot isn’t the movie itself but the misogynistic discourse that has swirled around it since this project was announced.
I did my best to ignore the anti-reboot chatter before I saw “Ghostbusters” just because I avoid reading anyone else’s opinion about a movie before seeing it. I knew that there was a contingent of angry male fans; of course there were. There are always men enraged by women’s autonomy, whether women are starring in a comedy reboot or “Thelma & Louise”; playing rock or video games; demanding their reproductive rights; running for president; or, you know, doing anything that some men don’t want them to do. The depths of this rage betray a deep fear about a loss of male power that’s been central to the cultural, social and political landscape for decades.
“Ghostbusters” turns on the threat of one apocalypse; the irrational hatred toward it turns on another end time.
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From left, Harold Ramis, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray and Ernie Hudson in the original “Ghostbusters” (1984).CreditSony Pictures
SCOTT I think what pleased me most about this “Ghostbusters” was how matter-of-fact — how chill — the movie was, notwithstanding the bombast of the climactic battle. I think we all agree that it has a generic, middle-of-the-road quality. That’s something it shares with the original, by the way, which far from being a transcendent masterpiece of cinematic imagination was a nice paycheck for the artists involved and an easy, inoffensive night out for the audience. Sorry if I ruined anyone’s childhood.
Mr. Feig, like Ivan Reitman before him, has assembled a workmanlike action-comedy about people at work. Professionalism may be the opposite of gonzo, but I think there’s something (dare I say it) radical about how job-focused this story is. Here’s a movie about female friendship and collegiality — which, of course, also entails rivalry, miscommunication and shifting allegiances — that feels no need to entangle any of its heroines in a heterosexual romance plot. Ms. Wiig’s character is distracted by the hotness of her secretary (I was reminded of Zero Mostel in the original “Producers”), but the real emotional stakes are between her and Ms. McCarthy. We don’t know if any of the Ghostbusters are gay, bi, straight, married, single, celibate, polyamorous or whatever. It’s not relevant.
Any more than it would be in a western or a platoon picture or a Mafia epic or a movie about a bunch of tech bros building a start-up. (Follow-up think-piece assignment: “Ghostbusters” is actually a remake of “The Social Network.”)
“Bridesmaids,” “The Heat” and “Spy” may have had naughtier (and funnier) jokes, but they were also careful to include rom-com flourishes and semiplausible love interests. “Ghostbusters” doesn’t do that. Nor does it pander to the male gaze.
And it’s not really out to prove that women can be strong or funny or handle powerful weapons. In most movies, such offers of proof are accompanied by reassurances that the women in question are still sexy or maternal or eager to settle down with the right guy — that they fulfill some kind of conventional idea of femininity. “Ghostbusters” doesn’t bother with any of that, and in the process seems to be on the verge of inventing a new set of archetypes.
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Chris Hemsworth in “Ghostbusters.”CreditHopper Stone/Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures Releasing
MORRIS Well, the movie does pander to this male’s gaze, at least in its appreciation of Mr. Hemsworth’s presumed hotness. There’s a randomness to this movie, much of which is devoted to him. (Why does he decide he wants to bust ghosts, too? What’s with all those cheesecake, shirtless head shots that keep showing up?) Still, the more I think about it the more I feel like every word of opprobrium or defense — every profane or besotted emoji — has been in some ways unfair to a movie that just wants to be. But Tony, your ascribing meaning and value to the workplace dynamics really struck me. These women are small-business owners who love their jobs. (To paraphrase the eternal Ray Parker Jr.: Bustin’ makes ’em feel good.) That’s a strong contrast to something like “9 to 5” (1980), whose women hated work because their boss was a pig. Now there’s no boss, just an endless supply of ghosts. Progress!
My objection to this movie is purely an exasperation with remakes of stuff that no one needs. (People of the world, for the love of Netflix, your childhoods are still available on demand!) Nonetheless, Manohla, your enthusiasm — and my friend Katie’s — won me over, at least in this case. This is an elastic concept that can withstand all kinds of reconfigurations.It’s not sacred. And to the girls in the audience, who know nothing about the battles roiling their parents’ Reddit feeds, the comedic quartet of McCarthy, Jones, Wiig and McKinnon is just business as usual. But that’s a difference that feels entirely generational, no?
DARGIS Maybe it’s generational but it’s also a matter of awareness. Because while a female-driven blockbuster may seem like business as usual to some, reams of data prove that movies like this remain an exception in the male-dominated industry. To cite (again) just one bummer study: From 2007 to 2014, women made up 30.2 percent of all speaking or named characters in the 100 top-grossing fictional films released in the United States. And while there’s certainly awareness about this sexism, at least in some quarters, that hasn’t translated into real industry progress.
For a big studio like Sony, and in an industrial climate in which male superheroes keep studios going, “Ghostbusters” is a gamble. The studio tried to revive “Ghostbusters” for years. In 2009, when Dan Aykroyd talkedto The Los Angeles Times about what was then “Ghostbusters 3” (meaning another sequel, not a reboot), female Ghostbusters were part of the story. This iteration would star the original cast and involve the older Ghostbusters passing the proton torch to a new group that included some women. Mr. Aykroyd specifically mentioned Alyssa Milano and Eliza Dushku, casting that was eagerly greeted on some entertainment sites.
“Why don’t they have BOTH of them in the movie? That way they can towel the slime off each other,” wrote one commentator on Screenrant. “Slime her!” a writer for Cinemablend enthused about Ms. Milano. Entertainment Weekly even ran a story — “Pick the New ‘Ghostbusters’ Girl!” — with a photo of Megan Fox, who it suggested could be “The Sexpot” alongside Zoe Saldana (“The Geek Queen”), Emma Watson (“The Touch of Class”) and Charlyne Yi (“The Wild Card”), who has “just the right nerd-girl charm for the Ghostbusters crew.” The stars of the new “Ghostbusters” are adult women — three over 40 — they’re not girls or especially charming. And while some moviegoers may not need this particular remake, I think there are plenty of girl and women moviegoers who would say, yes, we do.
