Weekend box-office – 28th of March to 3rd of April 2015 – will Divergent 2 surge at the box-office?

Marketing for the action sequel Insurgent will have you believe that it is a worldwide phenomenon but in fact the first film had a lukewarm commercial response at $290 million, outgrossed by the less hyped and far less expensive The Maze Runner ($340 million), and was mainly reliant on the US box-office. Critics particularly picked up on the unoriginality of the film, drawing major similarities to the far more popular Harry Potter, Matrix and Hunger Games franchises. Insurgent, under the new leadership of RIPD’s Robert Schwentke, may not succeed in fooling audiences once more.

US:

1. Insurgent – Director: Robert Schwentke – $52.3 million
2. Cinderella – Kenneth Branagh – $35 million
3. Run All Night – Jaume Collet Serra – $5 million
4. The Gunman – Pierre Morel – $5 million
5. Kingsman: The Secret Service – Matthew Vaughn – $4.6 million

UK:

1. Home – Tim Johnson – £6 million
2. Insurgent – Robert Schwentke – £2.9 million
3. The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel – John Madden – £0.6 million
4. Focus – Glenn Ficarra, John Requa – £0.5 million
5. The Gunman – Pierre Morel – £0.4 million

By no means a disappointment, Insurgent’s takings are actually slightly down from its previous instalment ($54 million) and is nowhere near the blockbusting triumph of Catching Fire, whose financial success this is desperately trying the replicate. While Cinderella keeps up its money making, the rip-off-of-Taken-from-the-director-of-Taken The Gunman has flopped despite boasting the cast of Sean Penn, Idris Elba and Javier Bardem. In the UK, animated adventure Home has had a surprisingly profitable opening and easily surpassed Insurgent. This week I’ve scored 4/10.

US:

1. Home – Tim Johnson
2. Get Hard – Etan Cohen
3. Insurgent – Robert Schwentke
4. Cinderella – Kenneth Branagh
5. While We’re Young – Noah Baumbach

UK:

1. Cinderella – Kenneth Branagh
2. Home – Tim Johnson
3. Insurgent – Robert Schwentke
4. Get Hard – Etan Cohen
5. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel – John Madden

Theo James, Shailene Woodley and Miles Teller in Insurgent, this week’s US number one.

The characters of Rihanna and Jim Parsons in Home, this week’s UK number one.

New poster for Oldboy plus new roles for Emma Watson and Jennifer Lawrence

Oldboy is Spike Lee’s English language remake of Chan-Wook Park’s award winning 2003 thriller (also ranked 85th on IMDB’s Top 250 films of all time) of the same name. Ten years on, Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men, The Goonies) is the headline star with Samuel L Jackson (Jurassic Park, Avenger Assemble), Elizabeth Olsen (Like Crazy, soon to be Scarlet Witch in Avengers: Age of Ultron), Hannah Simone (New Girl) and Sharlto Copley (District 9, Elysium) in support. His character, Joe, is the centre of a plot that sees him seeking vengeance on those who imprisoned him for 20 years without a cause, as well as seeking answers and going in search of the mysterious girl with a yellow umbrella. The new poster for the film was unveiled yesterday, as was some fairly gruesome footage of the movie at The 2013 New York Comic-Con.

Moving on, two of the most popular young actresses of the moment have picked up new roles in completely unrelated films. First off, it’s Emma Watson. Out of the central trio of young heroes in the Harry Potter series, Watson has possibly been the most critically successful since the series conclusion . She cropped up in My Week With Marilyn, had a celebrity cameo in This is the End, will star with Anthony Hopkins, Russell Crowe, Logan Lerman and Ray Winstone in Darren Aronofsky’s biblical epic Noah and had lead roles in the indie dramas The Bling Ring The Perks of Being a Wallflower. She could now be reuniting with her Wallflower director Stephen Chbosky for While We’re Young, although it’s becoming apparent that Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale, Frances Ha) may be directing after all.

Adena Halpern’s novel 29 (which itself has a plot – the story of a grandmother who’s much more friendly with her 29 year old grandaughter than her 55 year old daughter and gets her wish of becoming the same age of her grandaughter again granted – similar to Zac Efron flick 17 Again – were an elderly man has his wish granted and is once again his young self at high-school) is the inspiration for this production. Amanda Seyfried (Les Miserables, Mama Mia), Naomi Watts (King-Kong, The Impossible) and Ben Stiller (Zoolander, Tropic Thunder) are already going to star. According to IMDB, Watson has just started filming While We’re Young and will make that her third film of 2014 (alongside Noah – March 28th – and Your Voice in My Head).

The other young star is one of The Hunger Games, X-Men: First Class, Winter’s Bone and Silver Linings Playbook fame: Academy Award winner Jennifer Lawrence. Katniss Everdeen, as we like to call her, was attached to star in The Glass Castle in April 2012, just after the release of The Hunger Games. Since then, there’s been a halt in development after her Oscar win and a tonne of other roles coming her way (including reprising the role of Mystique in X-Men: Days of Future Past, East of Eden, American Hustle, Dumb and Dumber To and The Hunger Games’ sequels). We can presume that she’s close to sealing her role in the film that now has Destin Crettin (whose new drama Short Term 12 is getting all kinds of acclaim at the moment) set to direct.

Oldboy – December 6th

While We’re Young – 2014 or 2015

The Glass Castle – 2016?