Gruvi Weekly Digest #91 – The Royal Wedding and Other Revenue
A weekly catch up on things we’ve found interesting over the past week.
Featured recommendation
‘Harry & Meghan’ romance gets the Lifetime TV treatment
As this decade’s second and last Royal Wedding creeps closer, it’s the entertainment business as a whole that will experience an explosion of prime content. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding on May 19th at Windsor Castle, will ensure that not just magazines, newspapers and live TV will be set ablaze, but the film and TV business will be getting its share of heat, too.
Lifetime TV will be airing a week of programming leading up to the wedding, with its crown jewel being “Harry & Meghan: A Royal Romance” – a dramatisation of their courtship. The film will star Scottish actor Murray Fraser as Prince Harry and American actress Parisa Fitz-Henley as Meghan Markle.
It’ll be interesting to see if as many people watch Lifetime TV’s film as they did the biopic ahead of Prince William and Katherine Middleton’s wedding in 2011; despite its terrible reviews, the film was immensely popular. And with Meghan Markle being of a more “relatable” background, instead of nobility, there’s reason to believe the film will do well in living rooms across the USA especially. Read more here.
Other articles of note
Box Office: ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ Scores Second-Biggest Second Weekend Ever
The much anticipated Marvel/Disney collaboration has been breaking box office records all over the place. This time the film scored the second-biggest weekend ever, at $112.5 million. Only Star Wars: The Force Awakens managing to top this in 2015 with a whopping $149 million. Until just recently, it was fellow Marvel title Black Panther that held the title of biggest second weekend box-office sales, at $111.6 million. Read more here.
EU gross box office topped EUR 7 billion in 2017 for third year running
And speaking of box office revenue, the EU box office figures for 2017 are in, and for the third year in a row, have topped €7 billion. Interestingly, it’s US films that make up the top 20 admissions at European cinemas, with family film Despicable Me 3 leading the way, even though the previous instalments in the franchise weren’t as popular. The animation film is closer followed by other family films Beauty and the Beast and Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi.
Leading the charts of the European film is Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, followed by Paddington 2 and Kingsman: The Golden Circle. Read more here.
Google partners Fandango to let users buy movie tickets using voice command
In more box-office-y news, the US ticketing company has teamed up with Google to allow movie goers to buy their tickets using the Google Assistant voice command function. This feature is available on Apple’s Siri, and one doesn’t even need to know what they want to see. You can just say “showtimes near me”, and Google Assistant doesn’t require you to have the Fandango app. Read more here.
PS: Cannes Film Festival is now in full swing! And poor Terry Gilliam is still kept in suspense over whether his problem-plagued film Don Quixote will premiere as the festival’s closing film as he awaits the verdict from the French court.
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