A hat-trick week

T he top three films at the box-office were largely dominated by Ride Along, new release That Awkward Moment and Disney animation, Frozen.

That Awkard Moment

, starring Kevin Hart and Ice Cube, cruised to a third straight weekend at the top of the box-office charts, outearning new release That Awkward Moment. Ride Along collected $12.3 million in ticket sales over what was a slow Super Bowl weekend at many domestic movie theatres. The film has collected $93 million since its January 17 release.
Second place went to the long-running Disney hit, Frozen, which earned $9.3 million and benefited from newly added ‘sing-along’ shows, pushing its total since opening in late November to more than $360 million, according to box-office tracking firm Rentrak.
That Awkward Moment was third with $9 million in ticket sales at U.S. and Canadian theatres from Friday through Sunday. The film stars Zac Efron as one of three friends who pledge to stay single. On the Super Bowl weekend, moviegoers spent about $85 million in the domestic market, which includes theatres in the United States and Canada. Last week’s box-office take was $118 million, according to Rentrak. Marketed heavily to women who might be less inclined to watch the Super Bowl, That Awkward Moment, which received generally lackluster reviews, fell short of the industry’s $12 million forecast. Only 22 of 99 reviewers gave it a ‘fresh’, or positive, rating, according to the website Rotten Tomatoes. Of moviegoers who saw the film, 58 per cent said they liked it, according to the site.
Focus Features, the studio that released the low-budget $8 million film, said it was “designed as counter programming with a target audience of female movie-goers,” noting that it “scored best with our primary audience of younger females.” Labor Day, the other new release this weekend, collected $5.3 million in ticket sales to open in the No. 7 slot, and fell short of industry expectations of about $8 million.
The film stars Josh Brolin and Kate Winslet in an adaption from Joyce Maynard’s novel of the same name about an escaped convict who takes refuge in the home of a depressed single mother. Paramount Pictures, the Viacom-owned unit that distributed the film, promoted the film in conjunction with the American Pie Council. The January 23 National Pie Day was promoted through posters distributed to pie shops and bakeries that showed the two stars making a pie.
Paramount said the film also skewed female, with females making up 59 per cent of the audience. Rounding out the top five, the animated film The Nut Job was took fourth with sales of $7.6 million, while Mark Wahlberg’s Afghanistan war film Lone Survivor was fifth with $7.2 million.
That Awkward Moment was distributed by Focus Features, a unit of Comcast’s NBC Universal. Ride Along and Lone Survivor were distributed by Universal Pictures, a unit of NBC Universal. Labor Day was distributed by Paramount Pictures, a unit of Viacom. Walt Disney distributed Frozen.

 

That Awkward Moment — romantic comedy film enters the man cave

Actor Zac Efron navigates the tangled, complex web of dating and the New York singles scene in That Awkward Moment, a film that puts an uncommon spin on romantic comedy: the male perspective.
The movie, which opened in U.S. theatres recently, follows the lives and loves of best friends, 20-something men in the big city trying to remain emotionally unattached as they maneuver the tricky terrain of jobs and relationships. “This is the first look, I think, of what it is like to be a guy dating at our age and what it’s like to be out there,” said Efron, 26, who is also an executive producer on the film. “Sometimes it takes your best friends to get through it,” added the star, who shot to fame in the Disney High School Musical TV movies and more recently starred in the historical drama Parkland and the thriller The Paperboy. In That Awkward Moment, Efron plays confident, carefree Jason, who likes to hang out with his friends and does his best to avoid commitment.
When Mikey’s (played by Michael B. Jordon) marriage breaks up, he turns to his two best friends for solace. They guide him back into the unfamiliar dating scene and make a pact to stay single — while all he wants is to patch things up with his estranged wife.
Romantic comedies are a favourite type of film for writer-director Tom Gormican, who tried to revitalise the genre with That Awkward Moment. “I also wanted to put a different spin on it and have the movie take place from a guy’s perspective because I felt that is something we haven’t seen before,” he explained.
The R-rated film tries to give women a peek into the man cave, showing how young men relate to each other. It shows their sometimes raunchy behavior, how they mask the vulnerability and insecurity they feel about relationships and dating – and some of the terrible decisions they make along the way.