It’s smart stuff and given “War Room” was made on a dime (okay, $3 million) it’s the kind of profitable programmer studios dream of. War Room, a little-known Christian film, has shocked analysts by amassing an estimated and unpredicted $10.2 million.
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“It just had everything going for it”, Bruer said.
At the arthouse, everyone wanted to hang with “Grandma“, as the Lily Tomlin starring movie earned a great per-screen average of $16,423 marking a very healthy expansion. As such, you have to take the history in this film with a grain of salt. The metric gauges audience interest based on data from social media, online and mobile traffic, and advance ticket sales.
The Kendricks has come up with a new prayer strengthening book, The Battle Plan for Prayer: From Basic Training to Targeted Strategies, inspired by “War Room“.
Apparently this movie is ready to fight in the War Room, because that’s exactly what it did over the weekend, over the premiere of the week, and gained another $13.2 million, and a total of $134 million, making the movie the highest-grossing musical biopic of all times.
Though most of the cast is relatively unknown, the characters they played have had commercial success for years.
“The film follows the evolution of hip hop culture, and people are taking advantage of the opportunity to see that story on the big screen”, said Todd Boyd, a professor of race and culture at USC.
The latest Mission: Impossible film, Rogue Nation, comes in third and Owen Wilson’s new drama No Escape opens in fourth place. The film still sits in third place on the all-time domestic and worldwide box-office rankings ($643 million and $1.6 billion, respectively), but another $16 million in USA theaters could move it past second-place film Titanic on the domestic charts.
The movie is the Kendrick brothers’ first project independent of Sherwood Pictures, the filmmaking ministry of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Ga., where both brothers are associate pastors.
The gender breakdown for the film was fairly even. Audiences gave the film a B-plus on CinemaScore.
Psychological thriller “The Gift“, starring Jason Bateman, rounded out the top 10 with just over $3 million. Now I wish I could say $200 million was possible, but for now it’s not. Warner Bros. spent $2 million to acquire it out of the American Film Market, limiting the studio’s financial exposure. It co-stars Emily Ratajkowski (“Gone Girl”) and Wes Bentley. An estimated 52% of the audience was female.
With only 11 reviews on the aggregate site RottenTomatoes.com, “War Room” received a lowly 18 percent critical approval rating.
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HOLLYWOOD-It looks to be the sleeper hit of the summer. And make no mistake, among Marvel’s Cinematic Universe Ant-Man sits way at the top as far as box office legs go, with the likes of The Avengers, Iron Man or Guardians of the Galaxy.
