First Marty Hit the Box Office, Then the Gotham Awards Pandered to Big Barbie

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The big question going into last weekend was what would happen when the Letterboxd-logging Martin Scorsese partisans heading out to see Killers of the Flower Moon crossed paths with the decorum-violating, feels-feeling Swifties out for the second weekend of The Eras Tour movie? But aside from a handful of anecdotal reports of Taylor’s audio bleeding into Killers screening rooms (the evils of American empire-building hit different when they’re set to the muffled strains of “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”), the pair of films made for a solid one-two punch when it came to box-office receipts.

In this week’s update, we’ll get into the new box-office numbers, consult our crystal ball about the upcoming Scorsese awards campaign, and take stock of our first round of nominations from those quirky kids at the Gothams.

Box Office: Champagne Problems (a.k.a. We promise to stop using Taylor song titles as headers … soon)

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour picked up another $30-plus million in its second week, pushing it north of the $100 million threshold (40-point bonus? ✅) to settle at $129 million so far. With another 20 points added for topping the box office for the second week, Eras drafters have earned a sweet 229 points.

Killers of the Flower Moon opened with a strong second-place showing, particularly when you factor in its three-hour-and-26-minute runtime. Its $23 million opening weekend places it third among Martin Scorsese’s all-time opening weekends (behind Shutter Island and The Departed). Most important of all, that opening weekend keeps Killers from picking up the label of box-office bust, which can often spell doom for a high-profile awards contender (think Steven Spielberg’s last two contenders, West Side Story and The Fabelmans, which entered awards season as front-runners and ended up as afterthoughts).

Elsewhere, Exorcist: Believer and PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie both passed the $50 million mark over the weekend, earning each film a 20-point bonus. And as was the case last week, box-office-eligible films like Anatomy of a Fall, Dicks: The Musical, and The Royal Hotel are in limited release but haven’t crossed the $1 million mark yet.

Reputation (a.k.a. Let’s Talk About Marty)

Killers of the Flower Moon is Martin Scorsese’s first movie since 2019’s The Irishman; his first to hit the American box office since 2016’s Silence; and his first to open wide since 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street. All of which is to say we don’t have a ton of data to go on when it comes to predicting how well Killers is going to do this season in the MFL. For the moment, Scorsese’s latest is off to a good start with a strong opening weekend and a 92 percent critical approval on Rotten Tomatoes.

Now, there isn’t a ton of value in continuing to compare Eras and Killers in the context of the MFL (or otherwise) — but it’s fun, so why stop? Looking ahead, here’s what we might expect for each film over the remainder of the fantasy season:

Currently, The Eras Tour has earned 229 points. Between the rest of its box-office run and its Rotten Tomatoes points (it’s currently at 98 percent, which would earn it 50 RT points), let’s set its final tally at 350 points since it’s all but certain not to be a player come awards season.

We have no way to know how well Killers of the Flower Moon will do awards-wise, but as a loose proxy I ran The Irishman through our MFL scoring system; on awards-related performance alone, it would have earned 835 points. That’s for a movie that, you may recall, went a cool 0-for-10 at the Academy Awards. That point total seems like a fair baseline for Killers of the Flower Moon, awards-wise. Add in box-office and Rotten Tomatoes points and you’d be looking at about 950 points all told. That outranks the hypothetical 350 points we gave to The Eras Tour, but remember that at $5, Taylor’s movie was seven times cheaper than Marty’s. In short: Both will probably prove to have been a decent investment.

Painting Gotham Pink

The Gotham Awards kicked off the laurels portion of the MFL calendar yesterday, releasing its list of nominees for the best of the year while more than two months remain in 2023. It’s an annual tradition that ensures it’s first out of the awards season gate while breaking our brains a bit in the process. Ostensibly, the Gothams are supposed to recognize indie films, but this year the awards removed the budget cap for eligible films, which was just the wiggle room it needed to give one big studio nomination to Ryan Gosling for Barbie, a gambit so bold in its craven desire to hitch a ride on the Barbie bandwagon that you almost have to admire it.

While Barbie was the most surprising movie to walk away with points on Tuesday, Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers was the most lucrative, pulling in 50 points off of nominations for International Feature, Screenplay, and the performances of Andrew Scott and Claire Foy. Close behind All of Us Strangers were Celine Song’s Past Lives and the Sundance winner A Thousand and One, each getting 40 points off three noms. Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest landed 35 points, Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up pulled in 30, and Ira Sachs’s Passages also scored 30. Considering quite a few of these movies were cheap buys (Showing Up was a cool $2), the Gothams delivered some good value, and we can at least thank them for that.

Looking Ahead

How much damage can a haunted Chuck E. Cheese do to an army of Swifties? We’ll soon find out, as Five Nights at Freddy’s opens wide just in time for the Halloween movie crowds.

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