Donald Trump is still our president, and “The Boss Baby” is still our number one movie. While voice star Alec Baldwin was pulling double duty on “SNL” this weekend as both America’s own boss baby and skeezy alleged sexual harasser Bill O’Reilly, his big cartoon — about a super-smart toddler who wears a suit and tries to destroy humankind’s yen for cute puppies (this is the plot) — handily trumped (if you will) new contenders, like the codger caper comedy “Going in Style” (with Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Alan Arkin), the all-toon “Smurfs: The Lost Village” and the token fundamentalist rabble-rouser “The Case for Christ.”
April is a tough month — weeks away from the braindrain of the summer movie season, and very, very far away from the beginning of Oscar season. It’s not a dumping grounds the way January is, but it’s time for studios — and smaller distributors, like A24, who handled “Moonlight” and have the English action comedy “Free Fire” (with Brie Larson toting guns) going wide next weekend — to drop some outside-the-box fare so they don’t have to ever think about them again. (Don’t worry, there’s a new “Fast and/or Furious” entry this week.)
And so the three newbies never stood a chance. “Going in Style” and “Smurfs” went neck-and-neck during the weekend, with the latter ultimately proving triumphant, grossing $14 million to “Style”’s $12.5 million. “The Case for Christ” — a reportedly much more polished indie religious production than usual, featuring the likes of Robert Forster, “Traffic”’s Erika Christensen and even, for some reason, Faye Dunaway — came in 10th with $3.9 million, suggesting the air is coming out of the Christian apologist cinema tube that seemed cruelly over-inflated back in the days of “God’s Not Dead” (or its underperforming sequel).
That left every parent who hadn’t already taken their kids to see “The Boss Baby” with no other filmic distractions. Even falling 47.6 percent from last week’s haul, its $26.3 million gross still put it up top, with “Beauty and the Beast” not far behind at $25 million. (Its total is now $432.3 million — almost double the take of the film’s other biggest grosser, “Logan.”) Perhaps some of “The Boss Baby”’s so-far $89.3 million take is comprised of people who assume it’s trolling our current POTUS? If so, they’ve been in for a rude awakening, since it has nothing whatsoever to do with Agent Orange, except for Baldwin and a hero who sometimes act like a bit of a baby.
