WEEKEND BOX OFFICE: 'THOR 2' TOPS 'THOR', 'BEST MAN HOLIDAY' "STUNS"

*Universal’s The Best Man Holiday, Malcolm D. Lee’s sequel to The Best Man fourteen years after the original, debuted with a genuinely strong $30.6 million. Said number is an unquestionable triumph for the $17m comedy whether it ends up in 1st place or ends up in 9th place.

The lesson of this weekend’s box office is two-fold. First of all, we have another shining example of why ranking is relatively irrelevant. Disney’s Thor: The Dark World is the top film of the weekend with $38 million (-55%), but it is not the top story of the weekend.

The second lesson of the weekend is yet another one that should have been learned by now: Yes, black people go to the movies. We all like to act surprised over and over when Tyler Perry scores again and again or when Kevin Hart’s Laugh At My Pain or Let Me Explain break out in limited release.

It’s well-past time we noticed that black audiences like seeing themselves onscreen. More importantly, and this is arguably the key, they really like seeing black characters onscreen in starring roles in films that don’t necessarily revolve around racially-based adversity.

When Hollywood bothers to make films like that, African-American audiences generally show up in relatively solid numbers, with periodic blockbuster debuts like this one.

'The Butler', '42' And A New Wave Of Black Cinema

Tim Story’s Think Like A Man, loosely based on Steve Harvey’s dating self-help book, was a breath of fresh air last April. We all acted stunned when it debuted with $33 million the weekend before summer, but in retrospect it shouldn’t have been all that surprising. It was a genuine ensemble romantic comedy that happened to be filled with black movie stars without the Tyler Perry package. It was something we hadn’t seen much of since the early 2000′s.

If Think Like A Man was a (new) trendsetter like The Ring, Malcolm D. Lee’s The Best Man Holiday is The Grudge, the first major movie to capitalize on what Hollywood hopes may be a genuine fad. It doesn’t hurt that several cast members of The Best Man have become bigger stars in the last fourteen years. Taye Diggs, Morris Chestnut, Regina Hall, Terrence Howard, Sanaa Lathan, Nia Long, and Harold Perrinea are all “names” in the African American community.

Friday Box Office: 'Best Man Holiday' Steals Thor's Thunder

The Best Man Holiday not only operated as a nostalgic sequel for audiences pining for a time (1997-2004) when films like The Best Man weren’t an aberration, but also happened to be primed to capitalize on being the first big ensemble romantic comedy to open after the (we hope) trend-setter that is Think Like A Man.

The film played 75% female, 63% 35-and-older, and 87% black. The debut is slightly less than Think Like A Man and higher than every Tyler Perry debut save Madea Goes To Jail ($40m). Presuming it has a weekend-to-final multiplier closer to Think Like A Man (2.72x) than the usual Tyler Perry film (an average of around 2.25x), it’ll end its domestic run with $83m. That’s a huge win and should make Sony , which has Think Like A Man Too set for June, very happy.

Review: 'Thor: The Dark World'  

Thor: The Dark World is doing fine, with a solid $38.5m weekend. That’s a drop of 55%, which is a larger drop than Iron Man (-48%), Thor (-47%), and The Avengers (-50%) but slightly smaller than the likes of Iron Man 2 (-59%), Iron Man 3 (58%), The Incredible Hulk (-60%), and Captain America (-60%). I could argue that perhaps a smaller drop might have been in order due to little demographic competition and a November release date, but that’s beside the point.

Thor: The Dark World has a ten-day domestic cume of $147 million, with its worldwide total now at $479m, well above the entire $449m total of the first Thor. It may not be leggy, but it has big enough numbers, and it’s doing well enough as a kid-centric entertainment (see that 3.6x second weekend multiplier), that it doesn’t need legs.

Review: '12 Years A Slave' Is Among The Year's Best Films

The most striking image in “12 Years a Slave”—a film of many powerful moments and sequences—is of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a freeborn African-American kidnapped into slavery, hanging from a tree with a noose around his neck and one foot touching the muddy ground. Behind him, other slaves go about their labors—it’s a normal day on a Louisiana plantation in the eighteen-forties. Solomon was almost hanged for defending himself against an overseer; now he’s left to dangle, halfway between stability and annihilation. That’s essentially his situation for a dozen long years. The movie is based on a true story, which Northup told in a book of the same title, published in 1853.

Born in the Adirondack Mountains in 1807, he becomes a violinist, and lives a gracious life (which we see) with his wife and children in Saratoga Springs, New York. Then a couple of top-hatted circus gents offer him a job playing on tour, and, one night in Washington, D.C., they get him drunk. When he wakes up in the morning, he’s in chains, in a foul hole. As he’s taken out of the city by slavers, the director, Steve McQueen, raises the camera to reveal the Capitol in the distance. After a journey by ship, Solomon winds up on plantations in Louisiana, where he’s traded, loaned out, and, at one point, used as service for debt.

Throughout, he has the enraged consciousness of a free man. Yet he can’t reveal much of his mind or his temperament without incurring the wrath of men and women whose self-esteem is based on the belief that he’s an animal. What remains awake in his soul of a better life puts the moral condition of slavery in the harshest possible light.

“12 Years a Slave” is easily the greatest feature film ever made about American slavery. It shows up the plantation scenes of “Gone with the Wind” for the sentimental kitsch that they are, and, intentionally or not, it’s an artist’s rebuke to Quentin Tarantino’s high-pitched, luridly extravagant “Django Unchained.”

Review: "A Radical Review" of Gravity

Warner Bros.’ Gravity is nearing the end of its initial theatrical run (I’m expecting an Oscar-centric IMAX rerelease in early 2014), and it crossed $240 million domestic today with a $6.2m (-26%) weekend gross. It’s the fifth-biggest domestic grosser of 2013, having passed Fast & Furious 6 ($235m) and its racing towards $500m worldwide. Free Birds earned another $8.3m (-25%) for a new total of $42.2m. The good news is that Free Birds is holding quite well. The bad news is that Free Birds has just one more weekend before its goose gets cooked by Disney’s Frozen. Lionsgate’s Ender’s Game held up okay, dropping 40% in weekend three for a $6.2m frame. But having barely crossed $50m after 17 days ($53m), it’s another dead would-be franchise. Not that it matters that much with The Hunger Games: Catching Fire dropping next Friday. Richard Curtis’s About Time has now earned $11m domestic but $53m worldwide, while Rush has $26m domestic.

That’s it for this weekend. Join us for the debut of Lionsgate’s The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (review Tuesday or Wednesday), the single-screen debut of Disney’s Frozen (review Monday or Tuesday), and the wide debut of Disney’s Vince Vaughn vehicle Delivery Man.