The Year in Box Office: 2019 (updated)

 

The Year in Box Office

2019

note:  There were some things I meant to put in the post that I forgot.  They are added at the end.

As may be obvious, I have become greatly interested in box office results lately, noting in the last several Adapted Screenplay posts the highest grossing adapted films I haven’t seen for the year.  I have also put a lot of Box Office Mojo’s information into spreadsheets, which is doubly good, since, first, they became a bunch of dicks and put a lot of stuff behind a paywall (fuck you Bezos) and second, because I make a lot more use of it than they did anyway.

One of the bizarre things they have done now is that all of their yearly results initially list the calendar year.  Who has ever wanted that?  Who wants to look at 2015 and see that Force Awakens grossed just short of what Jurassic World grossed simply because of how late in the year it was released?  It’s a stupid default setting.  I don’t deal with that shit.  These are all based off the release date, not the calendar year of when grosses were accumulated.

It seems safe now to run this list now that COVID-19 has pretty much decimated the movie theater industry and brought box office to a virtual standstill, which means I can be pretty confident that nothing on this list will change much, if at all.

 

Best Adapted Screenplay: 2000

“I would rather be a ghost, drifting by your side as a condemned soul, than enter heaven without you.” Because the book has never been translated, I have no idea if that brilliant line exists there in any way.

My Top 10

1. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
2. Traffic
3. Wonder Boys
4. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
5. High Fidelity
6. Thirteen Days
7. The Virgin Suicides
8. Quills
9. The Claim
10. Aimee and Jaguar

note:  A truly fantastic Top 7 though it drops a bit after that.  My list continues down below though my #18 (Chocolat) and #19 (All the Pretty Horses) aren’t on that list because they’re reviewed as nominees.

 

A Century of Film: RKO

A Century of Film

RKO

The Studio

A first note that the picture of the logo above, as always, comes from here and again there is an excellent piece on the history of the logo.

“[David] Sarnoff and Boston financier Joseph Kennedy created RKO back in 1928.  They merged several film companies into a fully integrated major, RKO-Radio Pictures, with RCA providing the sound, and the new studio immediately took off.  In 1930, its second full year of operation RKO pulled in profits of nearly $3.5 million.  But business had been so good during the talkie boom that it was impossible for a major studio not to make money.  Only when the Depression hit in 1931 did Sarnoff realize how inefficiently the studio was being run.  He was impressed when Selznick looked him up in New York to pitch his unit-production scheme. … David Selznick, at age twenty-nine, became RKO’s ‘vice president in charge of production’.”  (The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era, Thomas Schatz, p 127-28)

 

Best Adapted Screenplay: 1999

“So I said, I love him and I’ll do anything if you make him alive. I said very slowly, I’ll give him up for ever, only let him be alive with a chance, and I pressed and pressed and I could feel the skin break, and I said, People can love without seeing each other, can’t they they, they love You all their lives without seeing You, and then he came in at the door, and he was alive, and I thought now the agony of being without him starts, and I wished he was safely back dead again under the door.” (p 95)

My Top 10

1. The End of the Affair
2. Eyes Wide Shut
3. Toy Story 2
4. The Talented Mr. Ripley
5. The Insider
6. Election
7. Metroland
8. Felicia’s Journey
9. My Son the Fanatic
10. The Cider House Rules

note:  A solid Top 5 but not so much for the Top 10.  But of course that’s balanced, as if often is, by a truly incredible original group of original scripts (American Beauty, Magnolia, Being John Malkovich, Three Kings, Topsy Turvy, Sixth Sense, Sweet and Lowdown, Following, Run Lola Run, Princess Mononoke, Abre Los Ojos).  This list is a bit different from the Nighthawk Awards because I saw Metroland since then and Fight Club dropped a bit when I re-watched it for the project – I still reviewed it because I had already gone through the effort of writing it, so it’s down at the bottom.  The rest of my list is shorter than usual and Fight Club (#11) is reviewed below as are my #16 (An Ideal Husband) and #17 (October Sky) because of award nominations.

 

A Century of Film: Comedies

If you don’t know what is being said in this scene you are sadly deficient when it comes to the greatest Comedy film ever made.

A Century of Film

Comedies

The Genre

“As America’s principal purveyor of entertainment, Hollywood packaged comedy in many forms.  In 1929, Variety surveyed the major studios and classified production trends into seven categories.  Comedy was divided into two – comedy drama and comedy.  The types subsumed under comedy drama consisted of society, rural, city, mystery, college, and domestic, and the types under comedy consisted of farce and action-adventure.  A quarter of all the films produced by the majors in 1929 could be classified as comedies of one sort or another.  Although comic types metamorphosed into the sophisticated, low-life, anarchistic, sentimental, folksy, screwball, populist, or romantic, the production trend remained a key component of every studio’s roster.”  (Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930-1939, Tino Balio, p 256)

 

Best Adapted Screenplay: 1998

“He didn’t move.  Not until the elevator door began to close.  Then raised his hand.  He did – Karen positive now it was Foley – raised his hand to her as the door closed.”  (p 148)

My Top 10

1. Out of Sight
2. Gods and Monsters
3. Primary Colors
4. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
5. Ringu
6. Live Flesh
7. A Simple Plan
8. The Butcher Boy
9. Character
10. Apt Pupil

note:  A very strong Top 4 but then it starts to fall off badly.  The full list is long, though, and is listed down at the bottom except for my #16 (Little Voice) which is reviewed because of its BAFTA nomination.

 

The Academy embraces nihilism (and other assorted Oscar trivia)

Sorry, Greta. Kathryn Bigelow knows how you feel.  Plus, you made history in other ways.

Well, I only got four categories completely correct in my predictions but they were major ones (Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Actress, Supporting Actress).  Sadly, I didn’t get Director, thinking the Academy would embrace Greta Gerwig’s triumph rather than Todd Phillips’ appalling nihilism (to spare questions in the comments, I think Joker is a bad film for reasons that will eventually be posted in the review, so please don’t ask, but have to do with its quality rather than its idiotic use of the Batman mythos and its wholesale nihilism).  Well, this is the same branch of morons who passed over Christopher Nolan when he did Batman right, Nolan again, Kathryn Bigelow when she won the Consensus and Ben Affleck when he won everything else.  So, let’s bypass the quality of the films for now and move on to the trivia.