‘The Jungle Book’ starts strong with $32.4-million Friday estimate

Disney’s reboot of “The Jungle Book” has blossomed quickly with moviegoers, taking in an estimated $32.4 million on its opening day Friday, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com.

Director Jon Favreau’s update of the studio’s classic 1967 animated film, based on the stories of Rudyard Kipling, easily leads the weekend box office tally so far, with director Malcolm D. Lee’s latter-day sequel “Barbershop: The Next Cut” landing in second place with an estimated first-day gross of just over $7 million.

“The Jungle Book,” which opened in 4,028 theaters, averaged more than $8,000 per screen, and appears well on the way to meeting or surpassing projections that it could gross $70 million to $80 million by the time the weekend draws to a close Sunday night.

It has benefited both from generally positive reviews, and lack of direct competition of other new family-oriented films.

It scored a solid 78 on the aggregate review website Metacritic.com, based on 42 reviews, only six of which were considered generally negative.

Times film critic Kenneth Turan wrote: “By turns sweetly amusing and surprisingly unnerving, crammed with story, song and computer-generated visual splendors, it’s such a model of modern crowd-pleasing entertainment that it brings to mind a celebrated quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald about filmmakers who were ‘able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.’”

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, critic Joe Morgenstern praised it, saying, “The new production, computer-animated except for a living, breathing boy at the center of the action, isn’t pretty or sweet but utterly stunning, as well as very funny; all those vaudeville antecedents haven’t been forgotten.”

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Arriving 14 years after the original “Barbershop” and a dozen years following the last sequel, “Barbershop 2: Back in Business,” the new “Barbershop: The Next Cut,” fared slightly less well with critics, earning a 66 on Metacritic, still high enough for an overall recommendation.

The Warner Bros. film, set in Chicago and starring Ice Cube, Regina Hall, Michael Rainey Jr., Eve, Cedric the Entertainer, Nicki Minaj and Common, among others, “stays on message about community pride, family values and personal responsibility,” Katie Walsh wrote in the Chicago Tribune. “It’s a wholesomely entertaining film, though some of the political discourse is a bit fast and loose with neo-liberal notions of individualism and respectability politics…. It’s a mixed message, but that perfectly encapsulates the confusion of 2016 American politics.”

Industry estimates put its weekend gross in the $25-million range.

The remainder of BoxOfficeMojo’s Top 5 estimates on Friday’s grosses were Universal’s “The Boss” at just under $3.1 million, Warner Bros.’ “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” taking in almost $2.4 million in its 22^nd day in theaters, and Buena Vista’s “Zootopia,” adding another $2.1 million, bringing its take after 43 days to $301.4 million.

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