Latest in Saving Mr. Banks

OPENING: Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (Paramount, wide) $18.3 est. 3-day opening for recast franchise NOTEWORTHY: Frozen (DIS) crosses $600M worldwide UPDATED MONDAY, 1:30 PM: Final numbers for all weekend estimates are less than expected as arctic temps across the nation kept moviegoers home Sunday night. As…

David Mermelstein is an AwardsLine contributor. This year's bevy of awards contender films is not only uncharacteristically large but also varied, particularly in how they were scored. The lack of similarity is apparent in everything from genre to instrumentation and even transcends musical matters, touching on the…

CHRISTMAS DAY OPENERS: The Wolf Of Wall Street (Paramount, wide) sliding down to No. 5 in 3-day, The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty (Fox, wide), 47 Ronin (Universal, wide) bomb, Grudge Match (Warner Bros, wide), Justin Bieber's Believe (Open Road, moderate), The Invisible Woman (Sony Pictures Classics, ltd), Lone Survivor…

8th UPDATE, MONDAY PM:  Here are today’s final Top 10 studio-reported actuals for the December 20-22 box office frame, courtesy of Rentrak. Paramount Pictures is the only studio to report estimates to Rentrak on Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues. Go figure. Disney’s Frozen did slip past Sony’s American Hustle to take…

After earlier premieres at the London Film Festival in October and the AFI Film Fest at the Chinese Theatre in November where the original Mary Poppins premiered in 1964, Saving Mr. Banks, Walt Disney Studio’s big awards contender, finally had its official Los Angeles premiere on a cool December Monday night. It took…

Palm Springs, CA (December 9, 2013) – The 25th annual Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF) will present Lupita Nyong'o with the Breakthrough Performance Award for 12 Years a Slave and Thomas Newman with the Frederick Loewe Award for Film Composing for Saving Mr. Banks at its annual Awards Gala. The Gala…

EXCLUSIVE: ‘Tis the season for many things but that also includes awards season, and this year what seems like more Q&A sessions than ever before.  If you have a contender you are out there touting it at screenings all over LA, New York, San Francisco and all points in between. Here’s an exclusive look at one I…

Following in the recent footsteps of her Saving Mr Banks co-star Tom Hanks, Emma Thompson sat down in London on Sunday afternoon for a trip down memory lane. At a BAFTA Life in Pictures event at the British Academy's headquarters, Thompson spoke of the important role that comedy played in her early career, and touched…

Charles Lyons is an AwardsLine contributor. Late last year, the acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Michael Morell, took the unusual measure of voicing the CIA's distaste for a Hollywood film. "The film takes significant license, while portraying itself as being historically accurate," Morell wrote in…

Screenwriter Kelly Marcel came late into the process of writing her famously blacklisted script for Saving Mr. Banks (12/13). Original writer Sue Smith had crafted it more as a biopic of Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers but Marcel focused instead on the three-week period in 1961 that Travers came to Disney studios and…

Any doubt that awards season has not kicked into full gear even though it’s only early November were firmly erased Friday night as I kept running into the same Hollywood Foreign Press Association and Academy members as we dashed from an AFI Fest pre-party for The Weinstein Co.‘s August Osage County premiere in…

The 2013 AFI Fest opening night at Hollywood’s famed, newly IMAX’d Chinese Theatre was as AFI president and CEO Bob Gazzale said “practically perfect in every way” — thanks in no small part to nabbing the North American premiere of Disney’s surefire Oscar contender Saving Mr. Banks. It was a no-brainer on AFI and…