Last Cab To Darwin scores at the box office

Australian film Last Cab To Darwin has scored the biggest Australian opening since The Water Diviner.

Michael Caton stars in Last Cab to Darwin.

Australian film Last Cab to Darwin has scored the biggest Australian opening since The Water Diviner in another great box office result for local cinema. The adaptation of the stage play, directed in both instances by Jeremy Sims and now starring Michael Caton and Jacki Weaver, opened with $1.148 million across the weekend and will likely continue to play given its appeal to the older demographic and, now, confirmed bookings by exhibitors. That opening weekend box office already places the strong drama fifth among all Australian films this year and it will jump into fourth, over the documentary That Sugar Film, this week, behind Mad Max: Fury Road ($21m), The Water Diviner ($10.18m this year; $15.8m in total) and Paper Planes ($9.65m). Icon Films rolled the dice on the film, opening it on 221 screens, although a major outdoor advertising campaign appears to have worked. Well played.

Amy Schumer’s press tour paid handsomely as the Judd Apatow comedy in which she stars, Trainwreck, opened at the top of the Australian box office this weekend. It added $3.1m to its two weeks of previews bringing its total box office to $6.1m, ahead of Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, which marked Tom Cruise’s return from pariah status with another $2.7m lifting it to $9.3m. The Fantastic Four opened with a respectable screen average and total of $2.7m in third place. Ant-Man is slowing in its fourth week with a total $13.9m although the most crowded cinemas on the weekend, by the reckoning of screen averages, was the Japanese anime adaptation Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection ‘F’, which earned a very handy $838,281 on a mere 61 screens. And Jurassic World has nudged Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 from fourth place on the highest box office list in Australia with $52.63m, now ranking behind Avatar ($115m), Titanic ($57m) and The Avengers ($53.25m).

The 64th Melbourne International Film Festival concludes this weekend with some special screenings and a surprise screening of Macbeth, the latest from Snowtown director Justin Kurzel. The Scotland-set film starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard is a ripper and won’t be released here until the first week of October. It will screen on Sunday at Hoyts Central in its Australian premiere. Other popular demand screenings this weekend include: on Friday, Putuparri and the Rainmakers and Tehran Taxi; Saturday, My Love, Don’t Cross That River and Racing Extinction; and Sunday, a double feature of Rolf de Heer’s Charlie’s Country and Another Country, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in Washington, DC (1980-1990), Prophet’s Prey and the wonderful Nepalese documentary by Australian Jen Peedom, Sherpa.

The Melbourne International Film Festival also lauded seven films in its MIFF Shorts awards with Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and The Rose, a star-studded short co-directed by Brendan Fletcher and artist Del Kathryn Barton,and produced by Fletcher and Angie Fielder, winning Film Victoria’s Erwin Rado Award for best Australian short film. The short features a soundtrack by Sarah Blasko and the voices of Mia Wasikowska, Geoffrey Rush and David Wenham. The best experimental short film was French film Tehran-geles by director Arash Nassiri and the best documentary short film was Lukas Schrank’s animated Nowhere Line: Voices from Manus Island. We Can’t Live Without Cosmos, by Russians Konstantin Bronzit and producers Alexander Boyarsky and Sergey Selyanov, was best animated short. When the Dogs Talked by director Elizabeth A. Povinelli and produced by the Karrabing Indigenous Corporation and Tess Lea won the major best short fiction film prize. The emerging Australian filmmaker prize went to David Easteal for his film Monaco (which he co-produced with Asuka Sylvie) and the Grand Prix for best short film went to Austrian director-producer Patrick Vollrath for Everything Will Be Okay. That film, Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and The Rose and Nowhere Line: Voices from Manus Island are now eligible to submit for consideration in the 87th Academy Awards.

Streaming video on demand service Stan has signed an exclusive deal with Warner Bros International Television Distribution that will bring several new shows exclusively to the service, including new hit iZombie and DC Comics spin-off Constantine and exclusive SVOD rights to all 236 episodes of the comedy series Friends, in remastered HD, and all of The West Wing, The OC and Fringe. The deal is a consolidation of the Nine Entertainment Company’s long association with Warner Bros; Stan is a joint venture between Nine and Fairfax Media.

Also included in the deal will be new comedy series Selfie, starring Doctor Who’s Karen Gillan, the relationship comedy A to Z, and current series The Flash, The Last Ship, Hart of Dixie and Forever, as well as several Warner Bros films.