Roadside Attractions-Lionsgate’s faith-based “I Can Only Imagine” has crushed early box office forecasts with a surprisingly strong $17.1 million at 1,629 locations in North America.
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Whitney Houston’s life and legacy will live on in theaters across the country later this year. Miramax and Roadside Attractions announced Friday they will release the feature-length documentary Whitney, an “intimate, definitive account of the superstar’s life and career” and “the only film officially supported by the late singer’s estate” across the nation on July 6.
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Lionsgate and sister company Roadside Attractions have acquired U.S. rights from Los Angeles Media Fund to Jesse Peretz’s romantic comedy “Juliet, Naked,” starring Rose Byrne, Ethan Hawke, and Chris O’Dowd.
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Saban Films has nabbed North American rights to Craig William Macneill’s “Lizzie” following its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. The look at infamous ax murderess Lizzie Borden stars Oscar-nominee Chloë Sevigny (“Boys Don’t Cry”) and Kristen Stewart (who played the apple of Edward Cullen’s eye in “The Twilight Saga”). Saban Films is planning a theatrical release in partnership with Roadside Attractions this summer. The bidding was said to be competitive.
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Olivier Martinez (Unfaithful) is set to star in action-adventure series Soldiers of Fortune, produced by New Zealand’s Mercenary TV Limited and Ireland’s Subotica, and executive produced Howard Cohen, Eric d’Arbeloff and Jennifer Berman of Roadside Attractions Television (Dear White People).
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Beatriz At Dinner dished up the best numbers on the Specialty side this weekend. Released by Roadside Attractions and FilmNation, Beatriz, starring Salma Hayek and John Lithgow, grossed over $150K in five New York and L.A. theaters.
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Roadside Attractions has acquired domestic rights to Forever My Girl, a romantic drama produced by LD Entertainment from writer-director Bethany Ashton Wolf. Alex Roe and Jessica Rothe star in the pic, based on the Heidi McLaughlin novel, which now will hit theaters October 27.
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Lionsgate will team with Manchester By The Sea distributor Roadside Attractions to co-release Stronger, and they’ve set a September 22 bow. Stronger, which stars Jake Gyllenhaal and is directed by David Gordon Green, is the second movie to cover the Boston Marathon bombing tragedy.
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Roadside Attractions and FilmNation Entertainment have acquired North American rights to Miguel Arteta’s Beatriz At Dinner. Mike White wrote it and Salma Hayek stars with John Lithgow. An immigrant from a poor town in Mexico, she has drawn on her innate kindness to build a career as a health practitioner. Doug Strutt is a cutthroat, self-satisfied billionaire. When these two opposites meet at a dinner party, their worlds collide and neither will be the same. Roadside Attractions and FilmNation also acquired distribution rights for the film in Australia and New Zealand. WME/CAA/UTA negotiated on behalf of the filmmakers.
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There were close to a thousand limited-release titles that opened in 2016 in North America. Assessing the specialty box office is not as tidy as with the studios. The area requires some subjectivity given when factoring in cast, release strategy and any other number of factors. From well north of 100 distributors, specialties — for the purpose of this article, titles that opened in limited release and spent most of their theatrical rollouts outside of wide release — grossed less than $550M in 2016, according to figures provided by comScore, which provided numbers for all titles assessed in this article.
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Amazon Studios and Roadside Attractions are partnering to distribute Doug Liman’s psychological thriller The Wall for release March 10. That puts it on the same date as Warner Bros’ Kong: Skull Island.
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Manchester By the Sea is making a splash in the awards race. Kenneth Lonergan's critical darling steamed ahead Wednesday, leading the Screen Actors Guild Awards with four nominations, including outstanding performance by a movie cast, actor (Casey Affleck), supporting actor (Lucas Hedges) and supporting actress (Michelle Williams). The devastating family drama — which also earned four Golden Globe nominations Monday — follows an anguished handyman (Affleck) who returns home to take care of his nephew (Hedges) after his brother (Kyle Chandler) dies.
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The movie, directed by London stage veteran William Oldroyd, isn’t based on the famous Shakespeare character but is an adaptation of Russian writer Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novella “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk.” Florence Pugh (“The Falling”) plays the title character: a 19th century young bride sold into marriage to a middle-aged man.
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George Mendeluk directed the feature, which stars Max Irons and Samantha Barks. The Stalin-era romance Bitter Harvest has been nabbed by Roadside Attractions for the U.S. George Mendeluk directed the feature, which stars Max Irons and Samantha Barks as young lovers in the 1930s during the Holodomor, Joseph Stalin's intentional starvation of the Ukrainian population. Mendeluk co-wrote the screenplay with Richard Bachynsky-Hoover.
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Miramax will partner with Roadside Attractions for the domestic theatrical release of the the doc from director Kevin Macdonald. Miramax has acquired U.S. rights to Kevin Macdonald's forthcoming documentary Whitney, which centers on the life and career of Whitney Houston. Miramax, which also acquired distribution rights for Latin America and China, will partner with Roadside Attractions for the domestic theatrical release of the doc. WME Global negotiated the deal on behalf of the filmmakers.
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Roadside Attractions founders and co-presidents, Howard Cohen and Eric d'Arbeloff, sat down with THR ahead of the French film festival to discuss their key demographic, why premium VOD is a dumping ground and how a dinner resulted in getting Lawrence cast in "Hunger Games."
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Amazon has tapped Roadside Attractions to handle the theatrical distribution of “Manchester by the Sea,” sources tell Variety. The partners will debut the film on Nov. 18, in the heart of awards season. A platform release is planned, with the film gradually adding theaters and markets. “Manchester by the Sea” should expand nationwide at some point in mid-December.
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The trailer for "Southside With You", the upcoming historical romcom (romcom? bioromcom?) about Barack and Michelle Obama’s “epic first date across Chicago’s south side,” was released today, and it looks incredibly charming. Tika Sumpter and Parker Sawyer star as the First Couple when they were just a Potential Couple—they see Do the Right Thing, they talk about how they fit into the world, and (most importantly) they have their first kiss after sharing an ice cream cone.
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Sometime in the 1790s, Jane Austen wrote a wickedly funny epistolary novella about a widow named Lady Susan, whose beauty and charm are matched only by her cunning ability to manipulate the doting men around her. Austen never tried to publish it. The novella, “Lady Susan,” was finally released more than 50 years after her death, but the story never really caught on with devotees of her other, more famous works.
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In the summer of 1989, the 28-year-old legal intern Barack Obama had the audacity to hope that his senior colleague Michelle Robinson would say “Yes we can” to a first date. Though the future first lady would later debate the technical precision of the word “date,” she did elect to meet this bold young man on a Saturday afternoon. That meeting turned into an all-day ramble through Chicago, from the Art Institute to a screening of “Do the Right Thing,” and now it has been turned into an improbably moving movie.
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