Lionsgate’s Nerve opened to $3.8 million on Wednesday from 2,538 theaters thanks in large part to younger femmes.
Advertisement
In the film, based on the 2012 Jeanne Ryan novel, Nerve is an app-based game that’s all the rage among the kids.
Starring Emma Roberts (American Horror Story) and Dave Franco (Now You See Me), the Nerve adaptation hails from Catfish directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman and features an adapted screenplay by Scream Queens’ Jessica Sharzer. Users can sign up as either a “Player” or a “Watcher”. Players are issued real-world dares for cash prizes, while thousands of watchers gleefully absorb the drama from a safe distance.
The dares can be as innocuous as kissing a stranger for five seconds, which is how Emma Roberts’ square high school student Vee gets hooked up with Dave Franco’s slightly older, slightly untrustworthy Ian. As they complete each task, they win sums of money, ranging from $100 (for kissing a stranger) to $15,000 (for walking on a ladder between tall buildings.) As the tasks get more unsafe, the online audiences grows larger and more intense. It gets them off their computers, which means this is the least desk-bound internet thriller yet. “And we look around and we’re kind of already living in a sci-fi movie with the technology that exists today and a lot of really simple things we take for granted”, Joost said.
The complicated truth is that the Internet’s dangers are entwined with its pleasures, the allure of instant fame, the illusion of contact with masses of people.
An age-old tale wrapped in cutting-edge technology provides the basis for “Nerve”, a teen film about an online game described as “truth or dare, minus the truth”. You get shoved into a room, say “hello” to a celebrity, say your name to the person slating video in the back and try to get as many questions in a small time frame before being told to wrap it up.
Advertisement
Not coincidentally Ian is also a player and the online watchers quickly pair them up to ride his motorcycle into Manhattan, where they complete a series of tasks that brings them escalating payouts into the thousands of dollars and sparks the possibility of romance (while getting Vee an unusual tattoo in the process).
