3RD UPDATE, Saturday 2:27AM: Even though the entire nation doesn’t celebrate The Columbus Day holiday weekend, it’s providing some extra ducats to studios’ bank accounts thanks to 14% K-12 schools off on Friday and 40% off on Monday. Reaping the benefits of this are the top three movies: 20th Century Fox’sThe Martian which just continues to mine dollars from people’s wallets with an estimated $10.85M Friday night (besting its $9M-$10M matinee projections) and a $36.4M second weekend (vs. its earlier $32M-$34M estimate), Sony’s Hotel Transylvania 2 which is looking at a strong third weekend hold of -21% with $21M and a total cume by Sunday of $117.5M, and Warner Bros.’ Pan which needs every single child out of school and in theaters so that it can make up some ground on its $150M estimated budget. Friday’s B.O. was only $5.2M, with an estimated second place debut of $18.25M…not so good. If Pan cost $15M, we’d be screaming that it was the cash cow of all ages. That’s not the case with its budget right up there on the screen with full-on VFX and zero sets.


Warner Bros. has turned its marketing machine on full blast for Pan from set pieces and stunts around the globe to Rooney Mara (Tiger Lily) and Levi Miller working down to the wire with appearances on the Today show Friday morning. However, the press has been shooting flaming arrows at Pan for quite some time. They completely lost it when Mara beat out Lupita Nyong’o and Adèle Exarchopoulos for the role of Tiger Lily. In their mindset, the media believed that a minority should portray Tiger Lily; author J.M. Barrie had always painted her as being Native American. Petitions swarmed the Warner lot calling for the studio to stop casting white actors in non-white roles. Wright defended the casting decision, citing that Barrie never identified Tiger Lily’s nationality in the source material; that it was more appropriate to portray Neverland’s denizens in the film as a group of multi-cultural indigenous folks.
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