Crushing its competition, American Sniper was the number one movie in America for the second weekend in a row. Clint Eastwood’s film brought in over $64 million gross, beating out the second-highest grossing film of the weekend by wide margin.
Taking second place The Boy Next Door, starring Jennifer Lopez. The film grossed just over $15 million, putting it well over $49 million behind Sniper.
While this represents a 27.9% drop in gross proceeds for American Sniper from the previous weekend, this is actually the smallest decrease in sales for any film that opened with earnings of over $85 million (the film grossed over $89 million in its opening weekend).
The film is riding a boost from its Academy awards nominations. And it is on pace to becoming the highest-earning war film of all time. It is likely to beat out 1998’s Saving Private Ryan, even adjusting for inflation.
In its domestic opening, Johnny Depp’s Mortdecai didn’t fare so well. The film debuted in ninth place, bringing in just over $4 million. This marks yet another poor performance for a Depp film and is becoming somewhat of a trend.
It’s been a long time coming, 56 years to be precise, since the Miss Universe title went to Miss Colombia. Not any more! The New York Film Academy would like to congratulate 2015’s Miss Universe from Colombia, Paulina Vega.
The 22-year-old business student from Barranquilla beat out runner-up Miss USA Nia Sanchez, along with over 80 other contestants from all around the world in front of a live telecast, which was attended by NYFA representatives.
Following the excitement, Vega had this to say, “It felt like home. I felt like I was in Colombia with my people. I felt that support in every moment of the pageant.”
Prior to the competition, Vega told reporters on hand, “It will be a dream come true to represent the woman of today. A woman that not only cares about being beautiful and being glamorous, but also cares about being a professional, intelligent, hard-working person.”
Now she has made that dream come true. As the winner, the New York Film Academy presented Miss Vega with a one-year scholarship to further pursue her education and passion to succeed.
NYFA has been the school of choice for numerous Miss Universe and Miss USA winners in the past, including Olivia Culpo who has since been seen as a co-host on Extra with Maria Menounos. Acting for Film graduate, and former Miss USA, Crystle Stewart plays the role of Leslie on Tyler Perry’s television show, For Better for Worse.
We wish Miss Vega the best of luck following her win, and hope to see her soon on campus!
Jane! Green-light this crazy thing! That’s right, everyone’s favorite animated space family is coming to the big screen—again—Warner Brothers announced this week. They last hit theaters with a feature-length movie in 1990, after two rebooted seasons in the mid 1980s. The original two seasons of the hit Hanna-Barbera show about George, Jane, Judy, Elroy, Rosie and Astro first aired in 1962, after the smash success of 1960’s TheFlintstones. A working-class family in the Stone Age resonated with mid-century Americans, so on the heels of President Kennedy’s moon initiative, it only made sense to write a Space Age comedy next.
Warner Brothers previously tried to bring a live-action version of The Jetsons in 2012, but the project never gained traction. The new project is said to be animated, though the company has yet to specify whether it will be hand-drawn or computer animated. Given that even traditionally hand-drawn properties as Peanuts are getting the CG treatment, it’s a good bet to say The Jetsons will also follow suit.
Matt Lieberman, a Disney upstart who has been making huge waves with his high-concept spec scripts, has been drafted to write the feature-length screenplay for the cosmic family. Lieberman previously scripted Dr. Dolittle: Tail to the Chief and is currently writing the anticipated reboot of 80s hit Short Circuit. The Jetsons will probably not make it to screens until at least 2017.
One of the more experimental and yet successful films to come out of the independent scene in 2014 was the Lenny Abrahamson film Frank. Though the film starred Academy Award nominated actor Michael Fassbender, who has proven his ability to carry a film with his looks, charisma and acting ability, the actor played almost the entire film (aside from 5 minutes) with a cartoonish, paper mache mask on.
The story surrounds the world of a young musician, Jon, who gets more than he can handle after joining an eccentric pop band led by the mysterious and enigmatic Frank. Not only does the film pack a powerful punch in terms of emotion, it truly captures the mindset of an aspiring musician.
Much like the work of Wes Anderson and Richard Linklater, the film brings a sigh of relief to filmmakers aiming to break the mold and try something different.
As a fun experiment of our own, the New York Film Academy wondered what it’d be like if some of our student films added a flavor of “Frank.” How would your film look different if you cast a “Frank”? Share your pictures with us on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter with #MyFrank.
(From left) Birdman’s Amy Adams, Naomi Watts, Emma Stone, Edward Norton, and Michael Keaton accept the award for outstanding cast in a motion picture at Sunday’s SAG Awards. (Photo: Kevork Djansezian, Getty Images)
This weekend’s double-header of the Producers Guild of America Awards and Screen Actors Guild Awards continued to vex Academy Awards predictors as Birdman upset Best Picture front-runner Boyhood in both ceremonies, nabbing the Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures at the PGA Awards and the Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture award at the SAG Awards. While Boyhood is still a likely candidate to take the top prize at the Academy Awards on February 22, these two victories for Birdman have placed it firmly in the front-runner category.
Elsewhere, the other major upset from this weekend’s awards marathon came from Eddie Redmayne who beat Michael Keaton for the Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role at the SAG Awards. While early predictions have placed Keaton as the front-runner for best actor at this year’s Oscars, his status now seems much less assured as the relative newcomer continues to scoop up awards.
As actors make up the largest branch of the Academy—accounting for 19% of the voting membership—the SAG Awards offer Oscar analysts a significant insight into how the Academy Awards might shape up.
In the other major film acting categories at the SAG Awards, things went as expected with Supporting Actor front-runners as Whiplash’s J.K. Simmons and Boyhood’s Patricia Arquette continued to clean up awards season. Arquette took her SAG award as a chance to salute her family’s long lineage of acting, stating “I’m a fourth generation actor.”
Meanwhile, Best Actress frontrunner Julianne Moore picked up the Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role, cementing her status as the category’s likely Oscar winner.
Orange is the New Black’s Uzo Aduba, who plays the unforgettable Crazy Eyes on the series, provided the SAG Awards with its most emotional moment when she gave a tearful acceptance speech for winning the Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series, informing the audience that “the day I got this job was the day I had stopped acting.”
In other memorable speeches, How to Get Away With Murder’s Viola Davis earned her first SAG Award for TV as an actress in a drama series, expressing her appreciation to ABC executives and the show’s creator for believing that her role as a sexual and conflicted heroine could be played by “a 49-year-old, dark-skinned African-American woman who looks like me.”
And seemingly making amends for its Best Animated Feature snub at the Academy Awards, The Lego Movie won the award for Outstanding Producer of Animated Theatrical Motion Pictures at the PGA Awards.
Awards season will continue its build-up to Oscar night with the DGA Awards slated for February 7. The full list of SAG Award winners can be seen here while the PGA winners can be viewed here.
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part1 has become the highest grossing domestic film for 2014, bringing in over $333 million. It managed to out-edge Guardians of the Galaxy by a slim margin of less than $10,000 in sales. And it did this without a 3D or IMAX run, which typically gives a boost to the sales numbers.
Transformers: Age of Extinction still holds the number one spot for sales worldwide. But that hasn’t dethroned Lawrence as the highest grossing performer.
Her two films (The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 & X-Men: Days of Future Past) brought in a total of $1.4 billion worldwide. This out-grossed Chris Pratt’s two films (Guardians of the Galaxy & The Lego Movie) by a margin of about $200 million.
Joining Lawrence and Pratt as one of the top grossing performers in 2014 is Scarlett Johansson, whose films Captain America: The Winter Solider & Lucy made $1.18 billion worldwide. Her indie film Under the Skin also made a dent in the earnings total.
It is clear that viewers are more than happy to open their wallets to watch a female lead, as 2 of the top 3 grossing performers were women (and 4 of the top 10).
This past Tuesday, Paul Sunday’s photography class welcomed a very special guest speaker, New York based documentary photographer Antonio Bolfo. Bolfo has a rather unique background — after working as the senior animator at Harmonix for four years he decided to study photo journalism, and eventually made the transition to law enforcement. Bolfo told the New York Times Lens Blog that he essentially became a police officer out of “boredom,” and the desire for, “street-level experience.” He also told the Times, “It was a really idealistic time in my life. I really thought I could make a difference. Save some people. It was very naïve, but that was my thought process at the time.” In addition to the other tools of police work, Bolfo began taking a camera on the beat. He captured an acute body of work documenting the stark realities of law enforcement in the South Bronx.
After a year of photographing while on the force, he left to pursue photography full time. Since then, Bolfo has visited many locations of crisis on our planet and become an award winning documentary photographer.
His work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, American Photography and Communication Arts. He is represented by Getty Images.
His presentation at the New York Film Academy’s Battery Park campus was a big hit with the photography students.
“He’s young and a very direct, engaging public speaker,” said Paul Sunday, Co-Chair of NYFA Photography. “He’s also an extremely accomplished photojournalist who has survived some perilous adventures.”
One of the interesting aspects of Bolfo’s approach toward photography is that he has the ability to capture images of the extremes of human experience, yet still make beautiful, well crafted images. He strikes a balance between truth telling and powerful image making that is uncanny and quite rare. He has seen a number colleagues sacrifice their lives for photography and is on a sabbatical from shooting. He told me that it is in extreme moments of experience that he sees peoples humanity. He is a fascinating character and was very inspiring for our students.
It’s a big day for fans of comic book adaptations, or for that matter, fans of Glee, Game of Thrones, or the recent Lifetime biopic of Aaliyah. Bryan Singer used his Twitter account this week to announce the three young stars of his latest X-Men sequel, X-Men Apocalypse. Apocalypse will be following the series reboot in Days of Future Past with a 1980s setting and starring returning cast members Jennifer Lawrence, Hugh Jackman, Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy.
However, the series will be recasting its original characters—Cyclops, Storm and Jean Grey. James Marsden, Halle Berry and Famke Janssen are out, and Tye Sheridan, Alexandra Shipp, and Sophie Turner are in. Sheridan is best known for his roles in Matthew McConaughey vehicles Mud and Joe, Shipp starred as Aalyiah in the Lifetime biopic and Sophie Turner has been winning over more and more fans as determined survivor Sansa Stark in HBO’s Game of Thrones.
Don’t worry if you’re more of a DC than a Marvel fan—there’s news for you too. Supergirl, a new CBS series with elements of a police procedural (because it’s CBS, duh) has found its lead—Melissa Benoist. Benoist is best known for Glee, and has found a more serious audience recently with her role in Best Picture nomineeWhiplash. Superman’s younger, blonder cousin should be showing up on TV sets this September.
Finally, if that’s enough news to satiate your comic book appetite, there have been a couple of not-quite-casting stories this week. Marvel is supposedly courting12 Years a Slave star Chiwetel Ejiofor for a “leading role” in their upcoming Avengers installment, Doctor Strange, which already has Oscar nom Benedict Cumberbatch set as the magician superhero. On the opposite side of the spectrum, Jake Gyllenhaal has taken himself out of the running to replace Tom Hardy, who recently dropped out of the leading role of DC’s Suicide Squad. The follow-up to this summer’s Batman V. Superman, Suicide Squad focuses on a team of supervillains who must save the world. While the production is struggling to find a new star, it’s now rumored that Ben Affleck’s Batman will make an appearance with Jared Leto’s Joker at some point in the film.
And that’s all the comic book movie news there is… for the next twelve minutes.
While movies are now grossing larger amounts than ever before, the ever-rising box office takes for such films as The Hunger Games and Guardians of the Galaxy belie the fact that theater revenue is actually declining, with 2014 seeing a 5% dip in domestic box-office sales.
In order to assess whether this is an increasing trend or just a temporary slump, a new PricewaterhouseCoopers survey set out to determine why less Americans are going to the movies. What the research found was that in spite of advances in technology, improved seating, and the ever-growing popularity of 3D films, the increasing cost of movie tickets is starting to discourage moviegoers. In the third quarter of 2014, the study found that the average ticket price was $8.08, which is up from $7.84 in the year prior, a fact that will likely not be lost on current producing school students who are learning how to produce profitable features in this declining platform.
While ticket prices were cited as the number one reason for declining sales, the authors of the study provided respondents with eighteen possible reasons as to why they would not go to see films in the theater. The top ten reasons are listed below.
Ticket prices are too high
Movies are not as interesting as they once were
Prefer movies “on my own schedule”
Prefer to spend money on other activities
Can see movies at home shortly after theatrical release
Prefer going out to dinner
Don’t have as much disposable income as a year ago
Decline in overall theater experience
Online content is equally entertaining
Too many people using phones and tablets in theaters
How do you feel about paying to see movies in theatres these days? Do you find yourself going less or more?
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