Imax Live is out today with the Openings Ceremony of the Paris Olympics. Bleecker Street debuts star-studded The Fabulous Four, Sundance winner Didi opens in limited release and Kit Harrington is a werewolf dad in The Beast Within. Again this weekend, another massive wide release, Deadpool & Wolverine, dominates the box office. Tentpoles are good for the box office but the indie market is still waiting to ascertain if big movies can boost small ones.
Imax wins for most topical. In its ongoing experimentation with live events, the big screen exhibitor is at this very moment showing the Opening Ceremony of the Summer Olympic in Paris at 100 locations nationwide.
Presales had been a bit slow but that was expected – it’s a four-hour-plus chunk in the middle of the day, even earlier on the West Coast – but Deadline hears showings are actually at or approaching sellout in a number of markets from New York and Atlanta to Washington, D.C., Detroit, San Francisco, Fort Myers, Philly, Boston and Minneapolis.
It’s the first time ever the Opening Ceremony has been presented live in Imax, for the first-ever Summer Olympic Opening Ceremony not held in a stadium. Rather, this is a tour of the city as a four-mile-long flotilla moves down the river Seine — nearly 100 boats carrying thousands of athletes from more than 200 countries. The craft are following the Seine past iconic sites from the Austerlitz Bridge and the Jardin des Plantes, crossing through central Paris and finishing in front of the Trocadéro, where the final elements of the ceremony will take place.
The live simulcast of NBC coverage, hosted by Kelly Clarkson, Peyton Manning, and Mike Tirico, is part of a partnership Imax struck this year with NBC Sports Next and Fandango, also an NBCU company.
Imax is hosting an Opening Ceremony screening at its LA headquarters for the United States Olympics & Paralympic Committee and guests, and a watch party at AMC Citywalk with ticket giveaways, photo ops, and promotional tie-ins at NBC Sports Grill and Brew.
There’s no trailer, but you can turn on the TV.
The widest specialty release this weekend is The Fabulous Four from Bleecker Street, which debuts on 1,045 screens in the U.S. and Canada. The film directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse stars Susan Sarandon, Megan Mullally and Sheryl Lee Ralph as a group of lifelong friends who travel to Key West to be bridesmaids in the surprise wedding of their best college girlfriend, played by Bette Midler.
Well Go USA Entertainment opens werewolf drama The Beast Within by Alexander Farrell on 110 screens. After a series of strange events leads her to question her family’s isolated life on a fortified compound deep in the English wilds, 10-year-old Willow follows her parents on one of their secret late-night treks to the heart of the ancient forest. But upon witnessing her father undergo a terrible transformation, she too becomes ensnared by the dark ancestral secret they’ve tried so desperately to conceal. Stars Kit Harington, Ashleigh Cummings, James Cosmo. Caoilinn Springall, Miriam Arabella Maslin, Adam Basil.
Limited releases: Focus Features opens Sean Wang’s feature directorial debut Didi on five screens in NYC (AMC Lincoln Square, Angelika, Alamo Brooklyn) and LA (AMC Century City, AMC Burbank). World premiering at Sundance to critical acclaim, the R-rated comedy drama won both the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award and the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Best Ensemble Cast for stars Izaac Wang, Joan Chen, Shirley Chen, Chang Li Hua. Didi is set in 2008 during the last month of summer before high school begins for an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy.
And Neon, still enjoying Longlegs love, opens Mother’s Instinct by Benoît Delhomme, starring Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway as best friends and neighbors whose lives are shattered by a tragic accident in a 1960s-set drama. Debuts in five markets (five screens) including New York and LA.