THE WEEKEND WARRIOR June 20, 2025
28 YEARS LATER, ELIO, BRIDE HARD, EVERYTHING’S GOING TO BE GREAT, ALMA AND THE WOLF
We’re slowly approaching the end of the second month of the summer movie season, as life just continues to fly by, and the success of How to Train Your Dragon last weekend is hopeful for the number of big movies opening over the next few weeks, with July being especially jam-packed. Will one or two of this week’s movies help kick things off a run of hits, or are they opening in a bad place where they might get overlooked due to other higher-profile movies? I guess we’ll have to see.
28 YEARS LATER (Sony)
In 2002, Danny Boyle was coming off of a string of moderate hits like his breakout Trainspotting and 2000’s The Beach, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, when he teamed with writer Alex Garland for a very different take on the zombie movie. 28 Days Later starred Irish actor Cillian Murphy, who wasn’t quite as well known decades before winning the Oscar for Oppenheimer. The movie premiered in the States at the Sundance Film Festival after it had already opened and become a hit in the UK. The movie would roll out internationally over the next few months before playing at the Tribeca Film Festival (that’s where I saw it!), and it would precede Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake by almost a year in terms of the concept of “fast zombies.” (Although let’s not forget that the “infected” in 28 Days Later were *NOT* zombies… they were people infected by what became called the “Rage Virus.”)
Cut forward just 22 years, and we’re already getting a sequel to that movie, pretty much ignoring the actual 2007 sequel, 28 Weeks Later, and six years too early to really fit its title if you ask me. For this one, he’s brought together a cast, featuring Aaron Taylor-Johnson aka Kraven the Hunter, Jodie Comer from “Killing Eve” who was also great in Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel and Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders, and I’m sure will get an Oscar someday. Speaking of which, the movie also stars recent three-time Oscar nominee Ralph Fiennes as a mad doctor who shows up a little over halfway into the film.
The general premise revolves around the survivors of the Rage virus being holed up on an island off of the mainland England and a small community who remains safe there. Taylor-Johnson plays Jamie, who takes his 12-year-old son Spike across to the mainland for the boy to get used to killing the infected, but Spike’s mother (Comer) has been very ill (not infected), so her son wants to seek out Fiennes’ doctor to help her. He’s also on the mainland, which is swarming with the infected.
A few years back, Boyle tried to return to the world of Trainspotting for 2017’s T2, which bombed very badly in the United States vs. in Europe, where it did much better. Even so, Boyle’s next movie, 2019’s Yesterday, written by Richard Curtis, was a massive success both in the US and abroad, so he clearly has retained many fans even with a decreased output since winning the Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire.
28 Years Later may be considered a similar “legacy sequel” as the most recent Scream movies with the fifth movie in 2022, opening with $30 million and grossing $81.6 million. The sequel to that new movie opened a year later with $44.4 million, as luck would have it, 28 Years Later already has a sequel in production with plans to release it in January.
I might as well say it, but Sony really needs a hit this year, as everything they’ve done has just been tanking right and left, and Karate Kids: Legends bombing wasn’t a great way to kick off the summer. Reviews and social media reactions won’t be hitting until sometime Wednesday afternoon, even though most regional critics will be seeing the movie on Tuesday night. It shouldn’t be too big a surprise that reviews are mostly positive at this time, since critics will be pushing for Boyle and Garland’s plan to make a new trilogy to succeed. Maybe those reviews will be enough to change some minds of people who weren’t sure about checking it out, but it’s not like 28 Days Later and its sequel have been readily available on streaming like the Scream and Final Destination movies.
At one point, there was a scenario where 28 Years Later could open with over $50 million this weekend, doing as well as Final Destination Bloodlines did back in May, but I think it will fall slightly short of that. After all, it’s still a very British film with heavy accents, making it a tougher sell in certain areas of the country. Either way, there’s a sequel already in production to be released next January, so it’s going to be important that this not only opens well but also has decent legs, the latter which might be even tougher, considering what’s coming out in the weeks that follow. With that in mind, it could struggle to get too far past $100 million, but I think it will open with less than $40 million this weekend, allowing How to Train Your Dragon to achieve a second weekend at #1.
ELIO (Disney/Pixar)
Offered as counter-programming this weekend is the new movie from Pixar Animation, which normally would be an easy victory to open at #1 if it wasn’t being released in the second weekend of How to Train Your Dragon and with Disney’s live action Lilo and Stitch still going strong. Elio is another attempt at an original animated movie from Pixar, although we’ve seen in recent years that they don’t do as well as the sequels, like last year’s mega-blockbuster Inside Out 2.
The movie revolves around a title character (similar to Luca and Coco), in this case “a space fanatic with an active imagination,” who “finds himself on a cosmic misadventure where he must form new bonds with alien lifeforms, navigate a crisis of intergalactic proportions and somehow discover who he is truly meant to be.” (Sorry, I hadn’t seen the movie when I wrote that last part.)
Elio is co-directed by Domee Shi, who wrote and directed the Oscar-winning short Bao and the Oscar-nominated feature Turning Red, along with Adrian Molina, the co-director of 2017’s Coco, and Madeline Sharafian, who has worked at Pixar in the art department and directed one of Pixar’s SparkShorts. This seems like new ground for Pixar, as it’s been common for the movies to have two directors but rarely three, though these movies are hard to get made, so it makes sense to divide and conquer in terms of getting them done, although the way the three directors are credited makes me think there’s more to the story than that.
Also, Pixar doesn’t always rely on voice talent to get people into theaters, though this one has a bonafide Oscar winner in Zoe Saldaña, voicing Elio’s aunt, as well as Brad Garrett from “Everybody Loves Raymond,” and Jameela Jamil from “The Good Place,” even if it’s doubtful they might be a draw for anyone other than a few grown-ups with kids.
Looking at Pixar’s recent history, the last original non-sequel to gross over $200 million domestic was 2017’s Coco, which opened with $50 million. Three years later, the next original Pixar, Onward, opened with just $39 million despite big name stars like Chris Pratt and Tom Holland from the MCU, and then COVID happened, shutting down theaters, so it only made $133 million worldwide. COVID did a number on the next three Pixar releases, Soul, Luca, and Turning Red, none of which got an official theatrical release in North America, although Soul did quite well overseas, all things considered.
2023’s Elemental opened after COVID had died down, and it opened on the same weekend two years ago to just $29.6 million, one of Pixar’s biggest disappointments, but at least it found itself great word-of-mouth business, eventually making $154 million in North America and $484.8 million worldwide. That’s definitely a little more hopeful for Elio, even though it has a much stranger premise that might not be as easy to sell as a world of elements or the emotions from the Inside Out movies.
By the time this Weekend Warrior lands, reviews for Elio will be out there, and they will be crucial to convincing people that this Pixar movie is one worth paying to see in theaters, rather than waiting for Disney+. In fact, reviews have been generally decent, even if tracking (which is rarely reliable) is not looking good.
It’s hard to ignore some of the Pixar disappointments in recent years, but maybe this one will be like Elemental where it will open low but then stick around through the summer as the only upcoming family/children’s competition is Paramount’s Smurfs in July, and that looks like ass. I still think this could open in the $30 million range, so slightly better than Elementals, and then we’ll have to wait to see if reviews and positive word-of-mouth help it get past $100 million domestically.
Mini-Review: I’m not sure that I could go into a movie with more skepticism than I did with this new movie from Pixar Animation, maybe because I was a bit of a lady bloomer to Pixar’s movies with Monsters Inc. being my first (I was 35) and oddly, also one of my very first reviews. I hadn’t watched many of the trailers, but I did watch seven minutes at a Cinema United preview event a few months back, and I just wasn’t that excited about it. That may have actually benefited Elio since I went in with the lowest of expectations.
The general concept is that Elio Solis (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) is an 11-year-old orphan (of course he is, this is Disney) living with his Aunt Olga (voiced by Zoe Saldaña), who works at the Montez Air Force Base and doesn’t find herself prepared to deal with a troublesome kid like Elio. Elio is fascinated by space and the idea of alien life, so of course, his dream is to be abducted by aliens, which due to a number of factors, including a message he sends into space when he’s left on his own, it actually happens. Elio finds himself transported to the “Communiverse,” where aliens of different planets and species presume that Elio is the ruler of Earth, rather than just a mere child. Before Elio can get settled, an unruly despotic alien named Lord Grigon (voiced by Brad Garrett) gets mad at not being accepted into the Communivere and declares war against its inhabitants, so they ask Elio to step in and help negotiate. Elio soon ends up meeting Grigon’s young son, Glordon (Remy Edgerly), and the two become fast friends, even as Elio has to contend with his new friend’s angry father.
I don’t have much more to say about the plot, which actually ended up being far more interesting than I was expecting from the general logline. Elio certainly grew on me as a character, and I didn’t even mind when another “kid” shows up in the story in the form of Glordon. What’s nice about Elio is that it’s not just trying to be joke after joke after joke, and it’s actually a warm family story about Olga trying to understand her nephew, even as he’s zapped into space. (They replace him with a lookalike clone that fools Olga for a little while.)
I’m not sure what it was about this movie but it had so many of the elements that helped me enjoy Turning Red a few years back, and I even got to see that one in a theater, even though it was mainly on Disney+. Usually, I would be tough to amuse with the quirky alien in this one, especially with so few voiced by actors I knew, but I enjoyed the dynamics between Elio with Grigon and his son. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised by how great Garrett was voicing the film’s main antagonist, and any problems I had with the plot didn’t last long, since the characters and situations all grew on me as the movie went along.
Elio is the type of movie that Pixar used to make, one filled with wonder and awe that will make you reflect back on your own childhood, leading to some very emotional moments. Whether or not it was intended by Disney, Elio may also be the perfect gateway to get your younger kids into “Star Wars”... oh, wait… that might actually be a bad thing.
Rating: 8/10
BRIDE HARD (Magenta Light Studios)
This weekend’s lower-key semi-independent-but-still-getting-a-wide-release is this new action movie directed by Simon West (Con Air, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, The Mechanic), reuniting Rebel Wilson and Anna Camp from the Pitch Perfect movies, joined by Oscar-winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph from The Holdovers, Anna Chlumsky (from My Girl and “Veep”), Sherry Cola from Joy Ride, Justin Hartley from “This Is Us,” and… Stephen Dorff?!? This is an action comedy involving a mercenary group invading a wedding, without realizing that the Maid of Honor (Wilson?) is a secret agent ready to fight back against anyone trying to ruin her best friend’s wedding.
Yup, this is another high concept lower-budget action movie in the vein of the recent Fight or Flight, starring Josh Hartnett, or Cleaner, starring Daisy Ridley, and it’s a rare release from Magenta Light Studios, who last year released Strange Darling. This is a different movie from those others, only because there are many Pitch Perfect fans out there that might be interesting in seeing an action movie version of Kirsten Wiig’s hit, Bridesmaids. The question is whether Magenta Light, another tiny distributor, has the marketing clout so that women who might want to see this will even know it exists.
As I write this, I haven’t found time to watch the movie in order to review, but watching the trailer, I feel like I know exactly what this movie is going to be like, which normally wouldn’t be my thing, even though I’m interested due to the cast. It might not be a surprise to anyone that the reviews for this one are horrid, although I wish the studio had renewed my screener so I could watch it just out of curiosity.
Either way, this offering something different from the weekend’s other new movies, and obviously, being more of a comedy than last week’s Materialists, it could pull in a small audience. Although I don’t have a theater count for this one, I still think it can get into the top 10 with between $2 and as much as $3 million, just because it’s such an easy-to-sell concept.
THE BOX OFFICE CHART
For a long time I was sure that 28 Years Later would win the weekend, but it’s hard to ignore some of the things working against it, and Pixar’s Elio has even more hurdles with two strong family films – both remakes of popular animated films – still playing in theaters. In other words, the new films better cross their fingers and hope for the best since there’s just too much competition coming in July.
1. How to Train Your Dragon (Universal) - $40 million -53%
2. 28 Years Later (Sony) - $37.2 million N/A
3. Elio (Disney/Pixar) - $31.3 million N/A
4. Lilo & Stitch (Disney) - $7.8 million -50%
5. Materialists (A24) - $6.2 million -48%
6. Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (Paramount) - $5 million -53%
7. From the World of John Wick: Ballerina (Lionsgate) - $4.5 million -54%
8. Karate Kid: Legends (Sony) - $2.8 million -47%
9. Bride Hard (Magenta Light Studios) - $2.5 million N/A
10. Final Destination Bloodlines (New Line/WB) - $2.1 million -48%
Sadly, due to my time limitations this week, I’m not going to be able to review everything I’ve seen. Heck, I still have stuff to review from last week’s Tribeca Film Festival! And we’ll how things go with this week’s Repertory Round-Up.
EVERYTHING’S GOING TO BE GREAT (Lionsgate)
Emmy-winner Bryan Cranston and Oscar-winner Allison Janney star in this family dramedy directed by Jon S. Baird (Stan and Ollie) and written by Steven Rogers (I, Tonya), in which they play Macy and Buddy Smart, a couple who are fully into producing regional theater, with two sons, who is more into theater than the other. When they have an opportunity to run a theater in New Jersey, they pack up, much to the annoyance of their teen son Derrick (Jack Champion from the Avatar sequels), although his younger brother Les (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth from Pinocchio) is fully on board. This premiered at Tribeca week and it’s getting some form of limited release in select cities, and I’ll have an interview with Baird and Rogers over at Cinema Daily US very soon.
ALMA AND THE WOLF (Republic Pictures)
Ethan Embry and Li Jun Li (from Babylon and Sinners) star in the new horror-thriller from director Michael Patrick Jann (Organ Trail and formerly of “The State”!) with Embry playing smalltown Oregon police officer Ren Accord, who has been having some problems when he runs into Li’s petrified title character, Alma, roaming the street covered in blood claiming that a wolf killed her dog. The movie just gets stranger from there, but it’s a solid genre flick, and you can watch my interview with Li Jun Li over at Cinema Daily US. This movie will be available on VOD starting Friday. I thought it was going to be in select cities but can’t find any theaters where it’s plkaying.
MARLEE MATLIN: NOT ALONE ANYMORE (Kino Lorber)
This week’s singular doc (that I know of), opening at the IFC Center with Marlee Matlin on-hand doing QnAs, starting on Thursday night, is this doc from director Shoshannah Stern that previously premiered at Sundance, and then played SXSW and more recently, at the Tribeca Film Festival. It explores the life and career of the Oscar-winning hearing-impaired actress who first made waves with Children of a Lesser God in 1986, and then helped propel Sian Heder’s to an Oscar for Best Picture with her Oscar-nominated, SAG Ensemble Award-winning performance. It will open in New York this weekend and then in L.A. on June 27.
REPERTORY
I wasn’t sure how much of this section I’d get to this week, but I tried to include the main repertory theaters in New York, and just had to leave out a few things.
This weekend, the monthly “Filmcraft: American Cinema Editors” returns, showing Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore with editor Marcia Lucas, ACE, on hand for a QnA after the Saturday screening.
The hugely popular “Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us” continues through the weekend with Floating Clouds and Sudden Rain on Thursday evening (tonight!) and screenings of Tsuruhachi and Tsurujiro, Traveling Actors, Morning’s Tree-Lined Street (which I’ve seen!), Late Chrysanthemums, and Flowing. Make note that some of these 35mm prints will only be shown ONCE, so if there’s one of those movies you want to see on film, don’t drag your feet on this series!
Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007) plays in 35mm on Thursday afternoon as well as Sunday morning and next Tuesday, part of the “Shanghai Dreams” series, which will also be playing a 4k restoration of Tsui Hark’s 1984 film Shanghai Blues, which I’ve seen and really enjoyed it, as one of the few Tsui Hark movies I’ve never seen before, but I couldn’t even begin to explain it. If you haven’t seen Tsia Ming-Liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn, it plays at Metrograph a lot, and you can see it on Friday afternoon.
Not that anyone will notice or realize, but I accidentally left out that the Duplass Brothers’ debut film The Puffy Chair will screen this weekend as part of “Mumblecore, What Are We Even Saying?”… I’ll be at the screening on Sunday night!
I’ll be seeing the Coens’ The Big Lebowski from 1998 probably for the dozenth time on Thursday afternoon as part of “Scenes from the ‘End of History,’” which will also screen Mahjong later on Thursday and Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together one more time on Monday.
“The Show Must Go On” must go on with screenings of Jamie Babbit’s But I’m a Cheerleader (1999) all weekend, but if you’re up late on Thursday night, there’s one more screening of Prince’s Purple Rain (1984). Funeral Parade of Roses screens one more time on Monday, but you know what? You can also catch that on Metrograph’s digital platform as well as tons of other movies you can’t see anywhere else. $5 a month or $50 a year which includes unlimited streaming and lots of other membership bonuses!
The Almodovar series “Volver A Carmen” continues this weekend with What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984) on Thursday night, Matador (1986) with Antonio Banderas on Thursday night (late!) and again on Tuesday night, as well as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) on Saturday and Sunday.
The Red Turtle plays one more time this afternoon (Thursday) as part of “Guided by Animals,” and then Miyazake’s Princess Mononoke (1997) will play a few times this weekend.
A pretty exciting new series playing this week at FilmLinc, and click on the link above to check out their brand spankin’ new website! This week, they’re doing the series, "The Other America: A Cosmology of Jordan Peele’s Us,” running from this Friday to next Thursday. It will include a double feature of Us with Oscar Micheaux’s Body and Soul on Friday night, followed by a QnA (not with Peele) but Us will play in 35mm a few other times over the weekend. Zemeckis’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit screens on Saturday, as does Jan Švankmajer’s Alice, also both in 35mm. Sunday sees Kenneth Branagh’s Dead Again and Orson Welle’s The Lady from Shanghai, both in 35mm. (Noticing a trend here?) Alice will screen again on Monday, as will Douglas Cheek’s ‘80s horror classic, C.H.U.D., and there’s more to come after that… like Otomo’s Anime classic, Akira, on Tuesday night, but that will be on DCP.
Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 classic, Apocalypse Now, will be screening in a new 4k restoration, being advertised as the “Long Unseen 1979 Original,” because I know there was a director’s version recently. It’s running for two weeks leading up to a new 4k restoration of the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, which will premiere on July 4. The John Cavale 90th Anniversary Tribute ends on Thursday (today) so you only have a few hours left to see some great movies with the ‘70s character actor, but Masayuki Suo’s Shall We Dance? Is continuing through next week. On Sunday, you can see the musical The Wiz in case you missed its reissue a few weeks back, as part of the weekly “Film Forum Jr.”
It’s pretty exciting that this great downtown arthouse and repertory theater is celebrating its 20th Anniversary this year, but I only found out that they were doing a special showing of four movies that played at the IFC Center and the Waverly before then on Tuesday. I was informed about this last Friday, but the celebrations will continue in August with 20 more movies. Right now, you can catch Richard Linklater’s “Before” trilogy, all three movies screening a couple times each day. Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth is getting a 4k restoration even though the movie came out less than 20 years ago… what the?! Todd Solontz’s Happiness continues to screen through the weekend, and this week’s Friday and Saturday midnight offerings include A Clockwork Orange, The Descent, and Brian Gibson’s Breaking Glass from 1980. Also, Harmony Korine’s Gummo, which is always playing somewhere.
Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon is playing a few times this weekend in 35mm on Friday night, Saturday afternoon, and Sunday evening. There’s a series called “Roxy Reelness” that will include Chinese Roulette (1976) on Sunday, the Wachowski’s Jupiter Ascending (2015) on Monday night, and Equation to and Unknown (1980) on Thursday night (tonight!).
Mira Nair will be at Paris on a Monday night for a screening of her beloved 2002 film Monsoon Wedding, the night before her son runs in the primary for New York City mayor… exciting stuff! This weekend, Al Pacino’s Dog Day Afternoon (co-starring John Cavale) will screen as part of the “Academy Museum Branch Selects” series, that one selected by the Writers’ Branch. “Hitch! The Original Cinema Influencer” also continues through the weekend with many of the master’s classics this weekend, as well as a screening of Mel Brooks’ comedy classic, High Anxiety, on Friday night, as well as other Hitchcock-influenced movies, including Brian De Palma’s Body Double, Fincher’s Gone Girl, and Almodovar’s Bad Education all on Saturday. Good stuff.
NITEHAWK CINEMA PROSPECT PARK & WILLIAMSBURG
On Saturday and Sunday brunch time, you can see the recent restoration of Zeinabu irene Davis’s Compensation (1999) at Prospect Park, which also plays as part of the ongoing “The Future of Film Is Female.” Also at Prospect Park, you can see Kimberly Reed’s recent I’m Your Venus as part of “Fix Your Hearts or Die: A Trans Cinema Celebration.” On Monday night at Prospect Park, you can see Todd Browning’s Freaks (1932) as part of “Strange Amusements.” Unfortunately, Miss Malice Presents the Wachowskis’ Bound on Wednesday night is already sold out.
Over at Williamsburg, you can see Mark Polonia’s 1994 film Saurians (which I’ve never heard of) tonight, followed by a QnA with Polonia. The “Fix Your Heart” series will show Alice Maio Mickey’s also fairly recent T Blockers on Friday and Saturday might near midnight at Williamsburg, and on Saturday and Sunday brunch time, you can catch Glamhag’s 2019 movie, Holy Trinity.
They just love Tom Cruise at MoMi apparently, as they follow-up their Mission: Impossible run from a few weekends back with “Tom Cruise: Above and Beyond,” which will show a lot of Cruise’s classics on the big screen, including Risky Business on Friday night and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders (1983) on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon. Jim Henson’s The Muppets Take Manhattan will screen twice this weekend, apparently with special behind-the-scenes footage. (Make sure to check out the “Mission: Impossible” and ongoing Jim Henson exhibits at MoMi, too!) On Thursday evening and Sunday afternoon, they’ll screen Martin Ritt’s 1961 film, Paris Blues, starring Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Joanne Woodward, and many jazz greats. Mike Koresky, who was just at the Metrograph showing A Star is Born, heads to Astoria to present Vincente Minelli’s Tea and Sympathy (1956), followed by a book signing for his new book, Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness.
Next week, it’s Brad Pitt vs. M3gan, as F1: the Movie takes on the sequel to the popular PG-13 horror hit from 2023. Check back sometime next week for my thoughts on those, although I won’t have a chance to see M3gan V 2.0 early enough to review.