On today’s episode of “Daily Variety” podcast, in our Box Office segment, Variety’s Jack Dunn unpacks another big weekend for “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” as well as the art of analyzing Friday night box office numbers. And Marc Malkin brings us a Just for Variety interview with John Waters, the iconoclastic director who turns 80 on April 22.
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It was other strong weekeed for Universal and Illumination’s “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” which held strong to the No. 1 spot for the second week. Dunn, Variety‘s associate web editor who covers the news desk on the weekends, has taken on the job of covering Friday night box office results on Saturday morning. As such, he gets the first glimpse of hard data on how movies are performing.
It’s a lot about reading the tea leaves. There’s so much data and numbers, especially in the box office available in the in the days and weeks leading up to the release, especially if we’re talking about something like like a ‘Super Mario Galaxy Movie’ or ‘Project Hail Mary,’ ” Dunn says. “For these big movies, all these forecasts and all this data is going to come out to try to give you a ballpark number about what exhibitors and studio execs and even just fans can expect their favorite movies or movies that are releasing in theaters to do but you know that data can only take you so far. Sometimes, audience tastes are shifting.”
Waters, meanwhile, spoke to Malkin about his ambition to keep directing feature films. His penned his first novel, “Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance,” in 2022 and it was optioned for adaptation as a feature film. But there’s still the big hurdle of financing.
“The last movie that was going to happen, my novel ‘Liarmouth,’ that was optioned. I wrote the script. They loved it. Aubrey Plaza was going to star, but then nobody will give us the money,” Waters says.
(Pictured: Filmmaker John Waters)
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