‘Chicago 7’ takes top honors at SAGs
NEW YORK: With the help of a few old friends, the box office rekindled some of its old might over the weekend. “Godzilla vs. Kong” scored easily the best opening of the pandemic with an estimated $48.5 million since opening Wednesday, even as it was simultaneously streaming at home.
The monster mash, from Warner Bros. and Legendary Entertainment, was the widest domestic release in the past year, playing in more than 3,000 theaters. Many theaters have been reopening over the past few weeks; about 60% of theaters were open this weekend, according to data firm Comscore. Most are operating at 50% capacity or less.
“Godzilla vs. Kong” stomped to $32.2 million from Friday to Sunday, according to studio estimates Sunday. The five-day total far exceeded expectations, and even outpaced the three-day debut ($47.8 million) of the franchise’s last entry, 2019’s “Godzilla: King of the Monsters.” Globally, “Godzilla vs. Kong” grossed $120.1 million over the weekend, bringing its two-week worldwide total to $285.4 million.
Made for approximately $160 million, “Godzilla vs. Kong” is one of a small handful of bigbudget movies to open in theaters. WarnerMedia, which owns Warner Bros. and HBO Max, hedged its bet, though, by streaming the film to subscribers in North America at the same time — a strategy it’s pursuing for all 2021 releases.
The studio didn’t offer viewing data Sunday but said “Godzilla vs. Kong” had a larger audience on HBO Max than any film or TV show since the service’s launch in 2020.
But clearly the clash of two of the movies’ most iconic big guys was enough to drive more people — whether they have HBO Max accounts or not — to the big screen more than anything else over the past the year. After a punishing year for theaters, it’s one of the most promising signs in ages that moviegoing can be revived after a punishing pandemic year.
David A. Gross, who runs the movie consultancy FranchiseRe, estimated that “Godzilla vs. Kong” would have debuted with a $50 million three-day weekend and $500 million worldwide if not for the pandemic.
LOS ANGELES, April 5, (AP): The starry cast of Aaron Sorkin’s 1960s courtroom drama “The Trial of the Chicago 7” took the top prize Sunday at a virtual Screen Actors Guild Awards where actors of color, for the first time, swept the individual film awards.
The 27th SAG Awards, presented by the Hollywood actors’ guild SAG-Aftra, were a muted affair — and not just because the red carpet-less ceremony was condensed to a pre-recorded, Zoom-heavy, onehour broadcast on TBS and TNT. The perceived Academy Awards frontrunner — Chloé Zhao’s “Nomadland” — wasn’t nominated for best ensemble, making this year’s postponed SAG Awards less of an Oscar preview than it is most years.
Still, the win for Netflix’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7” marked the first time a film from any streaming service won the guild’s ensemble award. Written and directed by Sorkin, “The Trial of the Chicago 7” had been set for theatrical release by Paramount Pictures before the pandemic hit, leading to its sale to Netflix. The streamer is still after its first best-picture win at the Oscars.
Frank Langella, who plays the judge who presided over the 1969 prosecution of activists arrested during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, drew parallels between that era’s unrest and today’s while accepting the award on behalf of the cast.
“‘God give us leaders,’ said the Rev. Martin Luther King before he was shot down in cold blood on this very date in 1968 — a profound injustice,” said Langella, citing events leading up to those dramatized in “The Trial of the Chicago 7. “The Rev. King was right. We need leaders to guide us toward hating each other less.”
The win came over two other Netflix releases — “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and “Da 5 Bloods” — as well as Amazon’s “One Night in Miami” and A24’s “Minari.” Had Lee Isaac Chung’s KoreanAmerican family drama “Minari” won, it would have been the second straight year a film largely not in English won SAG’s top award. Last year, the cast of “Parasite” triumphed, becoming the first cast from
“While it’s half of what it would be under normal circumstances, the weekend is a clear and positive indication that moviegoing has inherent strengths that aren’t going away, including going out for the group experience; the big screen quality; and the value for cost,” Gross said.
“Godzilla vs. Kong” had already launched with $123.1 million a non-English language film to do so.
The SAG Awards are a closely watched Oscar harbinger. Actors make up the largest branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and SAG winners often line up with Oscar ones. Last year, “Parasite” went on to win best picture at the Academy Awards, and all of the individual SAG winners — Renée Zellweger, Brad Pitt, Laura Dern, Joaquin Phoenix — won at the Oscars, too.
Those awards this year went to a group entirely of actors of color, potentially setting the stage for a historically diverse slate of Oscar winners: Chadwick Boseman, best male actor for “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”; Viola Davis, best female actor for “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”; Yuh-Jung Youn, best female supporting actor for “Minari”; and Daniel Kaluuya, best male supporting actor for “Judas and the Black Messiah.”
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Of those, Davis’ win was the most surprising in a category that has often belonged to Carey Mulligan (“Promising Young Woman”) or Frances McDormand (“Nomadland”). It’s Davis’ fifth individual SAG award.
“Thank you, August, for leaving a legacy for actors of color that we can relish the rest of our lives,” said Davis, referring to playwright August Wilson.
As it has throughout the awards season, best male actor again belonged to Boseman for his final performance. Boseman, who died last August at age 43, had already set a record for most SAG film nominations — four — in a single year. He was also posthumously nominated for his supporting role in “Da 5 Bloods” and shared in the ensemble nominations for both Spike Lee’s film and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”
It was the SAG Awards where Boseman gave one of his most memorable speeches. At the guild’s 2019 awards, Boseman spoke on behalf of the “Black Panther” cast when the film won the top award. “We all know what it’s like to be told that there is not a place for you to be featured,” Boseman said then. “Yet you internationally last weekend, led by especially strong ticket sales in China. There, it opened with $70 million, surpassing the performance of previous entries in the franchise. This weekend, it added another $44 million, Legendary said.
“Moviegoers have been waiting for an event film like ‘Godzilla vs. Kong’ to arrive on the big screen and the numbers don’t lie — it’s are young, gifted and Black.”
The Academy Awards frontrunner, “Nomadland” missed out on a best-ensemble nomination possibly because its cast is composed of largely non-professional actors. Zhao’s film previously won at the highly predictive Producers Guild Awards, as well as at the Golden Globes. “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” up for best picture at the Oscars and four other awards, could pose a challenge to the frontrunner.
In an interview following the pre-taping of the award for “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” Langella called the virtual experience much more civilized. “I’m in my bedroom slippers,” he said from New York’s Hudson Valley. “I have no pants on,” added his co-star Michael Keaton.
Eddie Redmayne, who plays Tom Hayden in the film, credited Sorkin and casting director Francine Maisler for assembling such a disparate group of actors — including Sacha Baron Cohen, Mark Rylance, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Jeremy Strong — into an ensemble.
“It was like a clash of different types of music, whether it was jazz or rock or classical -- but all of that coming together under Aaron. He was the conductor, almost,” said Redmayne. “It was a joy day and day out to watch these great and different and varied actors slugging it out.”
In television categories, the ensembles of “Schitt’s Creek” (for comedy series) and “The Crown” (for drama series) added to their string of awards. Other winners included Anya Taylor-Joy (“The Queen’s Gambit”), Gillian Anderson (“The Crown”), Jason Sudeikis (“Ted Lasso”), Jason Bateman (“Ozark”) and Mark Ruffalo (“I Know This Much Is True”).
The awards are typically the highest profile event for the Screen Actors Guild, though the union’s faceoff earlier this year with former President Donald Trump may have drawn more headlines. After the guild prepared to expel Trump (credits include “The Apprentice,” “Home Alone 2”) for his role in the Capitol riot, Trump resigned from SAG-Aftra. clear that wherever audiences are ready to safely return to the theater, they have, and we’re thrilled with the results,” Jeff Goldstein, distribution chief for Warner Bros., said in a statement.
A new series of movies was restarted in 2014 with “Godzilla,” followed by 2017’s “Kong: Skull Island” and 2019’s “Godzilla: King of Monsters.” Returns have been steadily diminishing. The previous three films opened domestically with $200.7 million, $168.1 million and $47.8 million, respectively. But the franchise had been leading up to the prize fight of “Godzilla vs. Kong.” Directed by Adam Wingard, its human co-stars include
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