Director James Wan’s supernatural thriller The Conjuring topped the box-office in the US last weekend but had a mediocre launch in Australia, where the genre historically has struggled to attract big audiences.
Frat-boy house party comedy This Is the End enlivened the Australian B.O. but Nicolas Winding Refn’s Thailand-set revenge tale Only God Forgives evidently was too violent for mainstream audiences in Oz and the US.
The Sandra Bullock/Melissa McCarthy comedy The Heat reigned again Down Under, fetching $2.8 million in its second weekend (down 28%), bringing its takings to a juicy $8.3 million.
Audiences sparked to the antics of James Franco, Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill and Jay Baruchel in This is the End, which grabbed $2.46 million plus about $500,000 in paid previews.
The Conjuring, which stars Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as paranormal experts who investigate a family who are terrorised in their remote Long Island home, drew $1.8 million. The film rang up $US41.9 million in the US, a successful outing for Wan, who directed the first Saw movie and executive-produced the other entries in that franchise.
Before Midnight, the third of director Richard Linklater’s films dealing with the relationship between Ethan Hawke’s Jesse and Julie Delpy’s Celine, rang up $315,000 at 55 screens.
Only God Forgives prompted as many boos as cheers at its Cannes film festival premiere. Ryan Gosling plays a guy who runs a kickboxing gym with his brother (Tom Burke) in Thailand as a front for drug dealing. The actioner took $155,000 on 55 screens in Oz and $315,000 on 78 in the US where it also went out on Video-on-Demand platforms.
The New York Times slammed Refn’s film as “pretentious macho nonsense…. so devoid of emotion that its ritualised gore acts as a narcotic.”