Weekend Box Office: The Master breaks a mostly unqualified, legitimate-sounding box office record
In the weeks leading up to The Master’s limited release on Friday, Paul Thomas Anderson and company sought out venues across the country with 70mm capabilities and used them for a number of benefit screenings. As a de facto promotional tour, the message being sent was a strong one: In 70mm, The Master became an event, an arthouse Spartacus, supported by quick sellouts and a groundswell of critical support. Anderson’s efforts—in support, incidentally, of his most challenging film to date—paid off in record fashion over the weekend, as The Master bowed to the highest per screen average ever for a live-action movie. At $146,000 per screen on five screens for a $730,000 total, the film blitzed theaters in New York and Los Angeles, and will expand to many more cities on Friday. Nearly as impressive in its own right, the Richard Gere financial thriller Arbitrage scored a $10,508 per screen average on 197 screens, a great number made better by the fact that it’s also available On Demand. It had long been assumed, by theater-owners especially, that “Day and Date” releases would discourage people from leaving their homes but this and Margin Call give an argument to the contrary—at least as it applies to wonky movies about Wall Street.