The thinking is the movie that’s been no. 1 for three weeks running is about poor black kids in a Los Angeles suburb whose lives helped define ’90s culture, and Dope is a movie about poor black kids in suburban Los Angeles who are obsessed with ’90s culture, so this release ought to go a lot better, but the reality is absolutely nothing good has come out since Aug. 13 and Straight Outta Compton has stayed on top mostly by default. Dope’s similarity to the recent alpha movie could end up working against it. Photos courtesy Open Road Films.
Straight Outta Compton has held for no. 1 three straight weeks now, and it has definitely been for lack of trying. The highest profile release since it came out was the critically eviscerated Sinister 2. Compton barely beat evangelist film War Room last weekend. When a movie’s tagline is as lame as “Prayer is a powerful weapon” and it had, like, no advertisements, and you can only get $2 million over on it, that’s not really something to brag about. The film looks to limp into another first place finish over Labor Day, as the only real movie slated for the three-day weekend is the Transporter reboot with some rapper nobody’s ever heard of taking over for Jason Statham. Wonder how that’ll work out.
Anyway, the time is clearly ripe for something — anything! — new to come out, and Open Road Films is filling that gap by re-releasing their Sundance darling/commercial flop Dope. While most movies that make it out of a festival go straight to arthouses and not many people hear about them, Dope was given a wide release and significant advertising, an honest shot to succeed. However, that wide release was June 19 against the second weekend of Jurassic World and the first weekend of Inside Out, and a director spliced with DNA from Tarantino, Hitchcock and Michael Bay couldn’t have drawn an audience under those conditions. Dope finished its run with a laughable $16 million, barely more than twice the $7 million Open Road paid for its domestic distribution rights in a six-way bidding war, and less than the $20 million it promised for advertising.
Wes Craven, who destroyed and rebuilt horror as a genre almost once per decade over a 40 year career, died of brain cancer last night in his Los Angeles home.
