When will ‘Brokeback’ play in Dayton?
The short answer is: Roughly eight years from now.
The studios are trying to play their cards right. With smallish movies dominating awards season, and word of mouth spreading like wildfire, Dayton audiences are wondering where all the good movies are. Keeping the level of anticipation up means that studios will pull in maximum grosses with each week of expansion. (Think of it like a presidential primary — you have to keep up the momentum.) It also means people are talking about their movie — every week, during awards season. You can’t buy publicity like that, but apparently you can sell it.
Brokeback Mountain is currently playing in the top 20 markets, including the suburbs of Chicago and New York, where it’s doing surprisingly big business. It’s scheduled to open in Columbus (and probably Cincinnati) on January 6, and will finally reach Dayton on January 13. (I suppose that date could come sooner if the film continues to be so uncharacteristically successful in suburban markets.)
Other films to look forward to? Terrence Malick’s The New World, opening in New York and L.A. on Sunday, will open wide on January 13. Woody Allen’s Match Point, which opens in New York and L.A. on the 28th, doesn’t yet have a projected arrival in the Gem City. Film-fest darling The Matador opens in NY & LA on the 30th, expands on the 6th, and goes wide on the 20th. Tommy Lee Jones’ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, which premiered at Cannes earlier this year (and has therefore been done for at least six months) is playing week-long, Oscar-qualifying engagements in NY & LA, and will then reopen in limited release in February. (How frustrating!) And what about Transamerica, which features Felicity Huffman in a Globe-nominated performance as a “pre-operative male-to-female transsexual?” Cross your fingers for an Oscar nod if you want to see this before DVD.
But what is there to see now? Opening Friday in Dayton are Rob Marshall’s much-maligned Memoirs of a Geisha and Steven Spielberg’s increasingly controversial Munich (a tad early, I think). So, nothing really.
P.S. NPR’s Terry Gross interviewing Tommy Lee Jones is awkwardly hilarious.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Movies
Comments
By mike
December 21, 2005 12:01 AM | Link to this
Aw, c’mon…it’s just four weeks away. It only went “half-wide” last Friday. The real question is will “Mrs. Henderson Presents” ever come within 300 miles of Dayton?By Jonathan McNeal
December 22, 2005 10:01 PM | Link to this
We, at THE NEON, want MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS most of all. It would be a perfect fit for us…especially seeing that LADIES IN LAVENDER did better business than the national average. Unfortunately, the new Weinstein Company is playing hardball - much like they did when helming Miramax. They won’t give us a date until they see how it plays in other markets. They’ll want to go as wide as possible.