Happy Labor Day Weekend! Thanks to the quirks of the calendar, some of this weeks' flashbacks will also be over Labor Day weekend, while others will merely be over the last weekend of August. Weirdly, Labor Day is the one holiday weekend of the year that's not considered a prime release date. Indeed, it's more or less treated as a dumping ground. In other words, this week and next, expect to read about a lot of obscure junk.
One Year Ago--August 31, 2018: This Labor Day weekend was largely dominated by holdovers, as Crazy Rich Asians, The Meg, and Mission: Impossible--Fallout continued to do healthy business. The highest newcomer was the expanding Searching, which jumped from 9 theaters to 1,207, and came in 4th, with $6.1 million. The film would prove to be a modest hit, grossing $26 million. Opening in 5th was Operation Finale, a real-life thriller about the hunt for and capture of notorious Nazi Adolph Eichmann, who escaped to Argentina after the war, and lived there until his capture by Israeli forces in 1960. Given the subject matter and cast (Ben Kingsley as Eichmann, Oscar Isaac as the agent who captured him), this seemed like it was greenlit to be Oscar bait, but instead was only Oscar Issac bait. The film opened to $6 million and ended up with $17.6 million. Despite a pretty good cast including James Franco and Dennis Quaid, the sci-fi actioner Kin was one of the biggest flops of 2018, opening in 12th to only $3 million and finishing its abbreviated run at $5.7 million.
Five Years Ago--August 29, 2014: Holdovers also dominated this Labor Day weekend, as Guardians of the Galaxy, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and If I Stay came in 1-3 for the second weekend in a row. The biggest opening belonged to the Paris-set As Above, So Below, a film whose premise seems to be "What if we turned the catacombs sequence of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade into a psychological horror film, and threw in the MacGuffin from the first Harry Potter film in for good measure?". It opened in 4th to $8.6 million, and topped out (or bottomed out, in this case) at $21.3 million. Opening in 5th is The November Man, which is not the long-awaited sequel to The January Man but instead an action thriller starring Pierce Bronson, reteaming him with his Dante's Peak director Roger Donaldson. It would open to $7.9 million and end its run with decent $25 million, ironically not quite making it to November, as it was out of theaters after October 30. Finishing less than a million outside the Top 10, despite playing on less than 400 screens, is the Mexican biopic Cantinflas, about the legendary comedian who is best known in the US for his co-starring role in the epic Best Picture winner Around the World in 80 Days. It opened to $2.7 million, but like many Mexican films that get a semi-wide release, it faded quickly, finishing its American run with $6.4 million.
Ten Years Ago--August 28, 2009: New Line had had quite a bit of success in the aughts with its series of Final Destination movies, wherein a group of photogenic twenty-somethings survive a horrific accident only to die in increasingly bizarre ways as Death determined that they shouldn't have lived, and decides that simply having them slip in the shower or get T-boned by someone running a red light isn't creative enough. The Final Destination, which is rather confusingly the fourth movie in the franchise (the other sequels were considerate enough to have the entry number in their titles) was more of the same, this time with the photogenic twenty-somethings surviving an accident at a speedway. Oddly, it ended up having the biggest opening of the franchise, at $27.4 million, and the highest final gross, at $66.5 million. It handily beat the new other horror sequel that weekend, Rob Zombie's Halloween II, which finished third behind Inglourious Basterds, opening to $16.3 million. It would end its run with only $33.4 million, ending the reboot franchise and putting the entire Michael Meyers saga on ice until its successful resurrection (but not Halloween: Resurrection) last year. The other major opening was the decisively non-horror Taking Woodstock, directed by Ang Lee and starring Demetri Martin, Jonathan Groff, and Eugene Levy as various people involved behind the scenes in putting on the festival. The poor reviews didn't help, but it seems unlikely that moviegoers would have embraced a film about Woodstock that focused entirely on its planning and running and ignored what was going on on stage. At any rate, it opened way down in 9th, to $3.5 million, and ended up grossing a mere $7.5 million.
Fifteen Years Ago--August 27, 2004: After acquiring the North American rights for the 2002 Jet Li epic Hero, which was a 2002 nominee for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars, Miramax sat on it for two years, before Quentin Tarantino talked the Weinsteins into releasing it. Instead of throwing it into some art house theaters in big cities, the studio opted to give it what was--and still is--the widest opening a foreign language film has ever had, The experiment paid off handsomely, as Hero opened at #1 with $18 million. To date, that remains the largest single-weekend domestic gross of a film not in the English language, and the film is the only foreign language title to top the North American box office for a weekend. Hero would ultimately gross $53.7 million, which was, and still is, the third largest gross of a non-English film in North America. Coming in second was the unnecessary sequel Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchids, which traded in the original's South American setting for Borneo in Southeast Asia, and the cast of the original with a bunch of no-names (the best known cast member, then and now, is Morris Chestnut). The film opened to a decent $12.8 million, but would ultimately finish with only about $32.2 million, a bit less than half of what the original made in 1997. At the other end of the chart sat two films with Oscar-winning stars and no audience. The serial killer drama Suspect Zero, with Aaron Eckhart and Carrie-Anne Moss as FBI agents, and Ben Kingsley as a man who may or may not be the titular suspect, opened to $3.5 million and would top out at $8.7 million. Meanwhile, SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2, a sequel even less necessary than Anacondas, somehow dragged Jon Voight, star of the original Anaconda, in as the villain. It would open in 11th to $3.3 million and would finish with a not-so-super $9.2 million.
Twenty Years Ago--August 27, 1999: Hollywood emptied their cupboard over the last weekend of August, dumping no less than six movies into multiplexes. Needless to say, all six were flops. After The Sixth Sense ruled again for the fourth weekend in a row, came both the highest grosser and the biggest flop of the weekend. The 13th Warrior, an adaption of a Michael Crichton novel, cost $160 million to make and opened to $10.3 million. Much of that cost was racked up during post-production hell, during which director John McTiernan was able to film and release a completely separate movie, The Thomas Crown Affair, which opened three weeks earlier. and finished sixth for the weekend. The 13th Warrior eventually topped out at $32.7 million. Farther down the chart, the undercover cop drama In Too Deep did decent business given its relatively small release, picking up $4.2 million. Miramax chose not to give it a wider expansion, though, and it ended up topping out at $14 million. Opening at 9 and 11 were two film that cost a combined $145 million and earned a combined $20.7 million. The ninth place movie was the sci-fi thriller The Astronaut's Wife, with Charlize Theron as the wife, who realizes that something is very wrong with her husband, the astronaut, played by Johnny Depp. It opened to $4 million and finished with $10.7 million. Meanwhile, in 11th was Dudley Do-Right, the second live-action adaption of a Jay Ward cartoon to star Brendan Frasier. Two summers earlier, George of the Jungle had been a surprise hit. Lightning did not strike twice, as Dudley was a dud, opening to $3.8 million and ending at $10 million. In between was Albert Brook's The Muse, a comedy aimed primarily at Hollywood insiders, about a struggling screenwriter (Brooks) who comes to believe a woman (Sharon Stone, who would receive her fourth Golden Globe nomination for this performance) is a genuine muse of Greek legend, which leads to him running himself ragged for her so he can be inspired. It would open to $3.9 million and would only inspire moviegoers to fork out $11.6 million, but at least it only cost $15 million. However, the most amazing result of the week was the performance of the family drama A Dog of Flanders, which despite opening in more theaters than The Muse or In Too Deep, could only manage $0.8 million and 21st place. The film, which somehow managed to scrape together $2.2 million by the end of its run, co-starred who is apparently the patron saint of pre-Labor Day weekend family bombs, Jon Voight.
Twenty-Five Years Ago--September 2, 1994: Forrest Gump, then in its ninth weekend, took the top spot away from Natural Born Killers, which fell to second. Hollywood only released one film over Labor Day, and despite the fact that its primary competition was three movies that had been out at least a month and an ultraviolent, hard-R film, it still opened in 5th. It's hard to blame moviegoers for rejecting Milk Money, a truly bizarre romantic comedy that starred Melanie Griffith who, after being paid by three tween boys to show them her boobs, given them a ride back to their idyllic suburb, where for reasons too stupid to recount, she ends up living in one of the boy's treehouse, posing as his math tutor, while the kid tries to set her up with his widowed dad (Ed Harris). As it turns out, audiences weren't craving a combo of Pretty Woman and Sleepless in Seattle, and the comedy debuted to $5.9 million and had a final gross of $18.1 million.
Thirty Years Ago--September 1, 1989: There wasn't much movement on the chart on this Labor Day weekend, as the Top 6, led by the third weekend of Uncle Buck, remained unchanged. Jumping into the Top 10 at #8 was the upset winner of the Palme d'Or, Sex, Lies and Videotape, the debut film of Steven Soderbergh. The film was being distributed by Miramax, at the time a tiny releasing house. Encouraged by the early results from art houses in big cities, the studio decided to give the film what was, at the time, its second-biggest release, and saw the film make $3.4 million, more than what all but one Miramax film had made in their entire runs at that point. The film would go on to earn a total of $24.7 million, which even today would be excellent for an art-house release, but was massive in 1989. It would be Miramax's biggest grosser until The Crying Game. The weekend's one brand new film in the Top 10 was Relentless, a serial killer thriller starring Judd Nelson as the killer and Robert Loggia and Leo Rossi as the cops on his trail. It opened in ninth to $2.8 million and would ultimately earn $7 million. Also opening was the British comedy Shirley Valentine, which would never make the top ten, but would ultimately take in $6.1 million, as well as earning two Oscar nominations, including one for lead actress Pauline Collins.
Thirty-Five Years Ago--August 31, 1984: Tightrope (in its third week) and Ghostbusters (in its 13(!) week) stayed #1 and 2 for Labor Day. Opening in third was Bolero, the latest vehicle for Bo Derek, who had shot to stardom thank's to 1979's 10, and had squandered it by only starring in a handful of follow-ups, all of them awful. Bolero, directed by her husband John Derek, was more of the same, existing mostly as an excuse to show off Bo's various assets. There was enough of an audience for that for the film to open to a not-bad $4.6 million, but that audience disappeared after the first weekend, as the film ended up grossing only $8.9 million. Open to a definitely bad $1.9 million in 12th was Flashpoint, a thriller starring Kris Kristofferson and Treat Williams as Border Patrol agents who stumble across a massive conspiracy connected to a political assassination twenty years earlier. Despite a fine supporting cast (Rip Torn, Kurtwood Smith, Jean Smart, Miguel Ferrer), the film would only make $3.9 million. Arriving in 13th was the New York City-set horror film C.H.U.D., a movie much better remembered for its title than for anything that actually happened during the film. It would open to $1.8 million and finish with $4.7 million. Co-stars Daniel Stern and John Heard would reunite six years later for a slightly more successful movie, Home Alone.
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