“Sully” soared high during Thursday previews, banking $1.35 million at the box office.
Clint Eastwood‘s latest directorial effort tells the story of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who successfully landed a plane on the Hudson River in 2009 after a bird strike. All 155 passengers were safely evacuated.
The Thursday number for “Sully” is a good one, given that Hanks’ “Bridge of Spies” grossed $500,000 at the Thursday previews. It ended up grossing $15.4 million on opening weekend when it debuted last year. In 2014, the actor’s film “Captain Phillips” opened to $600,000 and earned $25.7 million its opening weekend.
“Sully” is expected to make $24 million, based on a production budget of about $60 million. Reviews have been good — the biopic just received an 82 percent “fresh” score from critics counted on Rotten Tomatoes.
On Thursday, TheWrap reported that Warner Bros., the distributor, spared no expense when it came to getting the film as accurate as possible. The studio hired some of the actual rescuers that were there in 2009, and drove an A320 aircraft from the Mojave desert to Hollywood.
Screen Gems and Unique Features genre thriller “When the Bough Breaks” is also opening this weekend, and is set to easily grab second place with predictions close to $20 million from roughly 2,200 screens. Sony, the film’s distributor, is estimating roughly $11 million.
The film was produced for $10 million and stars Morris Chestnut and Regina Hall, revolving around the danger posed to a growing family by their increasingly psychotic surrogate. No Rotten Tomatoes score is available yet, as it doesn’t appear to have been screened for critics ahead of its release.
This weekend, Relativity is back after their bankruptcy filing with the “The Disappointments Room,” directed by D.J. Caruso (“Disturbia”). It is tracking at a low $2 million ahead of its debut run on roughly 1,500 screens, which sets the stage for one of the worst wide-release openings of all time.
Starring Kate Beckinsale, Lucas Till and Michaela Conlin, the film revolves around unspeakable horrors that a mother and her young son discover in the attic of their country home.
Clint Eastwood's 5 Worst and 5 Best Movies as a Director, From 'The Rookie' to 'Unforgiven' (Photos)
Ac Clint Eastwood celebrates his 90th birthday, we look back at the Oscar winner's highlights (and lowlights) as a filmmaker.
The Worst: "The Rookie" (1990)
In the wake of two small, personal movies ("Bird" and "White Hunter Black Heart"), Eastwood showed real rust copying the '80s vogue for brash buddy-cop movies: This one's just empty brutality, dumb jokes, thankless roles (poor Sonia Braga and Raul Julia), and hilariously awful thriller plotting. Eastwood seems bored playing another crusty lawman teamed with a newbie (Charlie Sheen), while the mayhem -- trashed bars, crashes, shootouts, explosions -- feels like the work of a caged genre icon lashing out.
Warner Bros.
"The Eiger Sanction" (1975)
A weird misfire for Eastwood, who's at a loss to make the cheesy espionage story work, and unconvincing on screen as an art professor-secret assassin in the Bond mold; he looks ready to burst out laughing having to do scenes with a cackling albino spymaster named "Dragon." (The less said about an African-American seducer named Jemima Brown the better.) Though the climactic mountain climbing sequence has its breathtaking moments, it's a clichéd slog till then.
"Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" (1997)
Eastwood's atmospheric strengths and underappreciated directing of actors eluded him in realizing John Berendt's best-selling nonfiction book about a Savannah, Georgia murder trial. It's an overlong checklist affair of clunky scenes and colorful players, but with little of the lived-in eccentricity rendered in the book. Even the good performances -- namely, Kevin Spacey and as-herself Lady Chablis -- are winking wind-up toys rather than emblems of an exotic, enchanting place.
Warner Bros.
"Changeling" (2008)
A bizarre true story from the 1920s becomes discordant melodrama in Eastwood's meandering Angelina Jolie vehicle about a Los Angeles single mother's hellish ordeal trying to prove that the boy returned to her by the police isn't her missing son. Injustice, corruption and serial killing prove too much for the director's laconic style. It's three noir movies rolled into one draggy, blankly dark mess.
Warner Bros.
"Jersey Boys" (2014)
There are elements to admire in the unlikely match-up of Eastwood and a toe-tapping Broadway musical about the Four Seasons, namely a few performances, and a certain grim tinge to its tale of showbiz climbers. But mostly it feels, strangely, both rushed and listless, stuck between pleasing nostalgia fans and rooting out grit and discomfort wherever possible. It's also visually bland and clichéd about its emotions, two rare descriptors for an Eastwood movie.
Warner Bros.
And the 5 best, startng with...
5. "Bronco Billy" (1980)
Eastwood's foray into old-fashioned screwball comedy -- there's even a madcap heiress (Sondra Locke) -- is really his first attempt at tweaking his tough-guy image, and it's his sleeper masterpiece. Turning a ramshackle, cash-strapped wild west show run by convicts of all colors into a warmly funny vision of a be-who-you-want-to-be America, Eastwood serves up a conservative's vision of the country that's inclusive, patriotic, and able to laugh at itself.
4. "Letters From Iwo Jima" (2006)
After "Flags of Our Fathers," Eastwood explored the same battle from the Japanese perspective, and -- to many people's surprise -- in the Japanese language. The result is a potently human, unflinching, and deeply felt evocation of how battle is fury, but war is a shroud asphyxiating the soul. As it monochromatically slides from the crisp daylight of preparation to the woozy gloom of tunnels full of doomed soldiers, it becomes Eastwood's purest, least sentimental vision of his most longstanding themes.
Paramount
3. "The Outlaw Josey Wales" (1976)
Marked by Bruce Surtees' exquisite cinematography, Eastwood's post-Civil War vengeance saga -- in which a Missouri farmer (Eastwood) turns hunted renegade after Union soldiers slaughter his family -- becomes a sly episodic Western about the hard, bloody road to peace. Moving easily between action, melancholy and humor (Wales' spitting on people and dogs is the stain of war made darkly literal), it's Eastwood's first great exploration of violence's psychic toll.
2. "Million Dollar Baby" (2004)
A poor young female boxer (Hilary Swank) wants to fight. The trainer (Eastwood) reluctantly trains. Punches await, small, and huge. An unabashedly rich-in-feeling movie about toughness, sacrifice, regret, and life on one's own terms, it's Eastwood wrenching the boxing picture from the triumph-of-the-spirit treadmill and introducing it to the abyss. That doesn't mean there isn't verve, humor and sentiment -- its character interactions are fleet and jazz-like -- but its beautiful soul is in the shadows.
Warner Bros.
1. "Unforgiven" (1992)
Eastwood held on to screenwriter David Webb Peoples' revisionist Western until the time was right, and the result was an Oscar-bestowed turning point and his best movie. Evocatively, suspensefully detailing a desperate widower's reckoning with his savage past, it tracked powerfully as both a pungent deflating of merrily violent western myths and a scarily tense depiction of how, as Eastwood's killer tells a scared young man, "We all have it comin,' kid." By the end, each gunshot is Eastwood mercy-killing a genre he loves, and knocking us to our senses about bloody movie justice.
Warner Bros.
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TheWrap critic Robert Abele rates the highlights and lowlights of the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s work
Ac Clint Eastwood celebrates his 90th birthday, we look back at the Oscar winner's highlights (and lowlights) as a filmmaker.
Warner Bros.
