Movie Preview: February 2018

The first month of 2018 is now in the books and things went mostly as expected. January box office is usually always ruled by the holiday holdovers and that was again the case with "Jumanji," "The Last Jedi" and "The Greatest Showman" earning the top three spots. The biggest surprise there was how well "Jumanji" and "The Greatest Showman" held on  while how quickly "The Last Jedi" has fallen off compared to the past two Star Wars movies. Although with $1.3 billion in the bank worldwide, no one at LucasFilm is shedding too many tears. "The Last Jedi" just happened to be more frontloaded than usual and its percentage falloff from "The Force Awakens" domestically will end up nearly perfectly matching the falloff that both "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Attack of the Clones" experienced. Anyways, "Jumanji" easily won the month with $171 million in January alone and a total over $300 million thus far. None of the new releases did much as "Insidious: The Last Key" was the best newcomer with $64 million. The best picture nominees didn't make a huge dent either, although the later than usual announcement had an effect there. February should pick things up, though, with several big titles on the schedule, so let's dive right in!

February 2nd - 4th-

Sunday, February 4 will be Super Bowl LII with the Patriots and Eagles facing off, so this is a weekend that Hollywood rightfully avoids as movies opening essentially only have two days instead of three unless they can successfully counter-program the game. The highest opening weekend ever on Super Bowl weekend is "Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour" with $31.7 million back in 2008. Only six other titles have even opened higher than $20 million. The only movie daring enough to attempt the feat this year is Winchester. No, not Sam and Dean Winchester from "Supernatural." Although these characters could probably use the brothers' help as this is a ghost movie loosely based on the infamous Winchester Mansion, which would lead itself to a decent horror movie under the right directors. Unfortunately it's the directors of the recent horror sequel "Jigsaw" that got their hands on this one and thus the studio has such low expectations that they didn't even screen the movie at all for critics. Best case scenario for this movie would be the $13 million that last year's "Rings" did on Super Bowl weekend, although the $5.3 million that "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" did the year before might be more realistic.

February 9th - 11th-

With the Super Bowl out of the way and most of the market being completely dead at this point, it's time for some life to be given to the box office and that'll be kicked off with the final movie in the Fifty Shades trilogy, Fifty Shades Freed. This has become a Valentine's Day tradition for certain audiences over the last few years and the box office has been fairly solid, especially for the type of movies these are. Fans of the books or the first two movies will most certainly be interested in seeing the Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele romance wrap up. As far as crunching the numbers for this final movie, "Fifty Shades of Grey" opened to $85.2 million and made $166.2 million total while "Fifty Shades Darker" opened to $46.6 million and made $114.6 million total. That's a 31 percent drop off when it comes to the final domestic total. If "Fifty Shades Freed" continued that same pattern, that would equate to $79.1 million total. And if "Freed" had the same multiplier as "Darker," that would mean it gets a $32.1 million opening weekend. Although it's safe to say that the fan base that stuck around for "Darker" don't care what others think about it, so it wouldn't be surprising to see "Freed" equal the numbers of "Darker" or even improve on them a bit as finales often do.

While "Fifty Shades Freed" will certainly be an adults only affair, the pre-Valentine's Day weekend also has a family option available as well with Sony's adaptation of Peter Rabbit. While this is a live action movie, the specific studio in charge here is Sony Pictures Animation, who were responsible for the critically acclaimed, cinematic masterpieces of 2017 in "Smurfs: The Lost Village," "The Emoji Movie" and "The Star." Yes, that's a sprinkle of sarcasm there. After successfully pleasing family audiences in the past with such franchises as "Hotel Transylvania" and "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs," 2017 clearly wasn't the best year for this studio, so they'll look to get back on track in 2018 with four movies. Proceeding "Peter Rabbit" will be "Hotel Transylvania 3" in July, "Goosebumps 2" in October and "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" in December. "Goosebumps" might actually be the best comparison here as both movies are live action films with Sony Pictures Animation doing the CGI creatures. "Goosebumps" made $80 million in 2015, which is a number that "Peter Rabbit" is capable of hitting, despite the fact that fans of the source material might be scratching their heads as to what Sony is doing to their beloved Peter Rabbit.

The final movie of the weekend is the Clint Eastwood film The 15:17 to Paris. While "Peter Rabbit" is targeting families and "Fifty Shades Freed" is targeting adult females, "The 15:17 to Paris" will be targeting a separate adult audience who are looking for a drama rather than a romance, meaning all three of these movies could do good business this weekend. "The 15:17 to Paris" is the story of the August 2015 attempted terrorist attack on a Thalys train traveling from Amsterdam to Paris. The 25-year-old gunman Ayoub El Khazzani from Morocco attempted to open fire on the train when his assault rifle jammed and he was then tackled and subdued by three American friends, Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos and Spencer Stone, two of whom were off-duty U.S. Armed Forces members. Sadler, Skarlatos and Stone wrote a book about their experience that this movie is based off of. Usually in a movie like this, actors are cast to play the main characters, but what makes this movie unique is that Sadler, Skarlatos and Stone will be playing themselves in the movie, which is something that the studio can get away with since the events were less than three years ago. They'll bring the unique element of knowing exactly what they did to stop this gunman.

February 16th - 18th-

A little later this year, the Marvel Cinematic Universe will be celebrating their 10th anniversary as "Iron Man" was released May 2, 2008. "Avengers: Infinity War" will be released two days after that anniversary on May 4. Before we get to that movie, though, we have the huge movie of February, Black Panther, the 18th movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Amazingly, the 17 previous movies have averaged $310 million domestically for Marvel, with all three movies from 2017 eclipsing that $300 million mark. "Black Panther" will almost certainly be their fourth straight movie to hit that mark as the hype for this movie is currently through the roof after the worldwide premier at the end of January led to unanimous praise for the film, calling it one of Marvel's best yet, with especially strong praise being given to Michael B. Jordan's villain. This has led pre-sales to skyrocket and the movie is currently outpacing "Deadpool" at the same point in pre-release. "Deadpool" opened to $132 million in February 2016, so those are the numbers we're looking at. And not only does it look like we have another great Marvel film on our hands, this will also be a culturally significant with a predominately black cast and black director in Ryan Coogler opening in black history month.

No major movie will be challenging "Black Panther" this weekend, which is a smart move for obvious reasons, but there will be two smaller movies hoping to provide a bit of counter programming, the first of which being Aardman Animation's Early Man. For some reason, the stop-motion animation genre is a tough sell here in the United States as no stop-motion film has ever hit $20 million on opening weekend and only one has hit the $100 million domestic mark. Luckily for Aardman, that one $100 million movie belongs to them, but that was back in 2000 with "Chicken Run." Their most recent film "Shaun the Sheep Movie" only opened to $5 million in 2015 and "The Pirates! Band of Misfits" opened to $11.1 million before that in 2012. Luckily Aardman does have more of a foreign audience as both previously mentioned movies earned over 70 percent of their total overseas, a big portion coming in their home country of the U.K. So if "Early Man" fails in the U.S., it may still have an audience. Aardman is going caveman-themed with this movie, which stars Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston, Maisie Williams and Timothy Spall. It's already been released in the U.K. and reaction is a bit mixed, but leaning positive, which is a decent sign, but not an incredibly great one.

The final movie is an attempt at a biblical epic from Pure Flix and that is Samson. This popular biblical tale with Samson and Delilah has been portrayed on the big screen at least five times before. There was a 2009 Australian film, a couple of T.V. movies in the 80's and 90's, and a 1922 Australian silent film. But the most notable one is Cecil B. DeMille's "Samson and Delilah," which is the highest grossing movie that was released in 1949 as it was one of the major movies from the glory days of the biblical epics, which most notably included DeMille's other biblical epic "The Ten Commandments" in 1956 and "Ben-Hur" in 1959. Modern-day biblical movies have had a bit of a rocky track record, with the highest grossing ones being the bigger Hollywood productions, of which this is not. Pure Flix themselves have released nine movies in theaters beginning in 2015, which have averaged $8.6 million total domestically. Their last five movies have all opened below $5 million with their highest opening weekend being "God's Not Dead 2" with $7.6 million. With Samson being a well-known biblical figure, this could end up on the high end of Pure Flix's releases, but this is the wrong weekend to attempt to attract a more general audience outside their typical Christian fan base.

February 23 - 25th-

The final weekend of February will see the first major comedy of 2018 with Game Night. This is a movie that has vibes of "The Man Who Knew Too Little" as the main characters think they're participating in a simple game night without even realizing something much more drastic is happening around them. The movie stars Jason Bateman, who has been rather successful leading this genre in the past with efforts such as "Horrible Bosses" ($117.5 million), "Identity Thief" ($134.5 million), "Horrible Bosses 2" ($54.4 million) and "Office Christmas Party" ($54.7 million). Those later two could be around where "Game Night" lands as they also both opened around the $15 million mark. Directing this movie is the directing duo of John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein who almost directed "Spider-Man: Homecoming" and are the latest to be attached to DC's "Flashpoint" in 2020. What they have directed is the 2015 comedy "Vacation," which also opened around $15 million and made $58.9 million, another sign that this is the range "Game Night" could land. The last comedy in theaters was "Father Figures," which disappointed majorly, so we really haven't had a hit comedy since "Daddy's Home 2" in November, meaning the time could be right for our next comedic hit.

The movie that could become the sleeper hit is Alex Garland's Annihilation. Garland has worked as a screenwriter since the early 2000's, but his directorial debut came in 2015 with the movie "Ex Machina," which received very high praise and nearly got into the best picture race at the Oscars, despite being released in April. What it did end up getting was a surprise win for best visual effects and a best original screenplay nomination. Lead star Alicia Vikander nearly got nominated as she got in at the Globes, but the Oscars instead gave her a nomination for "The Danish Girl," which she won. Needless to say, fans of "Ex Machina" are eager to see what Garland is bringing to the table with his second directorial effort. "Annihilation" is based on the novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer, the first book in the Southern Reach Trilogy and is a sci-fi, fantasy, horror film where a group of scientists, researches and other volunteers discover a mysterious zone that seems to be cut off from the rest of the world. The movie stars Natalie Portman as a biologist, Jennifer Jason Leigh as a psychologist, Tessa Thompson as a surveyor, Gina Rodriguez as an anthropologist, Tuva Novotny as a linguist and Oscar Isaac as Portman's injured soldier husband.

The final film of the month is the romantic drama Every Day. This stars Angourie Rice, who played roles in "The Nice Guys," "Spider-Man: Homecoming" and "The Beguiled," so she's been experiencing quite a bit of success as an up and coming young actress. The now 17-year-old Angourie plays a teen girl named Rhiannon who falls in love with a boy who wakes up in a different body, living a different life, each day. The movie is based off of the book by David Levithan and is directed by Michael Sucsy who previously directed "The Vow," which opened in February 2012 and wound up making $125 million domestically. Orion Pictures would certainly be ecstatic if this came anywhere close to that. The studio was very successful in the 80's and 90's, releasing movies such as "Dances with Wolves," "Platoon" and "Silence of the Lambs," but shut down in the late 90's. "Every Day" is their first film after being officially revitalized by MGM. Perhaps a better comparison than "The Vow" might be last month's "Forever My Girl," which had a pretty good opening of $4.2 million from just 1,114 theaters, Roadside Attraction's biggest opening ever. "Forever My Girl" fell just 16 percent in weekend two, meaning it could have a decent run that "Every Day" could match.