Mark Cosgrove’s Weekly Blog – 23 Jan 2019
Each week Cinema Curator, Mark Cosgrove, reflects on Watershed’s cinema programme and the performance of individual titles over the weekend before looking ahead to what’s coming up.
Studio Canal released Beautiful Boy into the awards season on a limited release in week 1, on circa 120 prints, probably hoping to emulate the success of more edgy indie awards films like Manchester by the Sea. However, unlike that film, Beautiful Boy has had mixed reviews and Oscar snubs. Its weekend figures had a reasonable £2K screen average so I am very pleased with hitting double that figure. It’s a busy time with lots of strong product and with only 3 screens I had to make decisions, so I prioritised Beautiful Boy with all shows over the weekend and this appears to have paid off.
Elsewhere The Favourite still continues to dominate in its 3rd weekend and now major Oscar nominations – Best Film/Actress/2xSupporting Actress/Director/Original Screenplay – should help sustain it in the coming weeks. Colette is also doing healthy business in its 2nd week as well as the phenomenon that is Free Solo, which is still doing great sell-out business on limited shows in outer fringe slots, such as first thing in the morning. I will continue to find slots here and there. Holdovers are interesting at this time of year.
The much smaller scale release Monsters and Men also opened and was always going to be a niche affair, especially trying to get airtime with all the awards titles grabbing the headlines. It was on one show a day and I’m happy that it averaged 20 admissions per screening.
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