All the pre-release controversies in the world won’t keep folks from a movie that they genuinely want to see.
Kevin Hart and Bryan Cranston in ‘The Upside’STX and David Lee
With the always important “rank doesn’t matter” caveat (it’s how much a movie earns, not where it ends up on the charts), The Upside just gave STX Entertainment its first number one debut. The Neil Burger-directed film, starring Kevin Hart, Bryan Cranston and Nicole Kidman, earned a genuinely impressive $19.7 million this weekend. That’s not far off from Hart’s more explicitly comedic vehicles like Sony’s The Wedding Ringer ($22m in 2015). It’s no Ride Along ($41m in 2014) or even Night School ($27m last September), but this is more of an adult-skewing drama. Moreover, Tiffany Haddish and Ice Cube > Cranston and Kidman in terms of “butts in the seats” draws.
By the way, Kidman is having a hell of a weekend, as Aquaman just topped $1 billion worldwide and Destroyer is… okay, that’s not the kind of movie that makes a ton of money, but it has still earned $426,000 entirely on her star turn. But back to The Upside. It is a remake of a blockbuster 2012 French drama about a wealthy white paraplegic who hires a comparatively poor and down-on-his-luck black ex-con to provide day-to-day care. The François Cluzet/Omar Sy drama earned an obscene $426 million worldwide (including $166m in France and $79m in Germany) to become, back then anyway, the biggest-grossing non-English-language grosser ever at the global box office.
