A24 expands David Lowery's Mother Mary from its April 17 five-theater platform run to a nationwide release Friday, pitting Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel's two-hander against the densest limited-release slate of the month. [1][2] The film's opening weekend did $168,000 across those five screens; BoxOffice Pro's wider-release projection sits at $2 million to $4 million for the expansion. [3] Lowery is working closer to A Ghost Story and The Green Knight territory than to his Disney output; Pete Hammond's Deadline review positioned the film as the director's "most personal work," channeling his own Catholic upbringing and his childhood Madonna fandom into Hathaway's pop-idol title role. [4]

The Coel pairing is the critical pivot. Hathaway's Mary Catherine Chester — known on-stage as Mary — reunites with Coel's costume-designer Sam Anselm after a decade's estrangement; seven original songs written for the film are performed by Hathaway in full elaborate concert stagings, which is why the theatrical expansion matters more than a pure streaming drop would. [4] The supporting cast — Hunter Schafer, Kaia Gerber, Jessica Brown Findlay, Sian Clifford, Alba Baptista, FKA Twigs, Atheena Frizzell, Isaura Barbé-Brown — is thick enough that several of the limited-release competitors this week cannot counter. [5] Lowery's own gambit, per Deadline, started as an off-Broadway-style one-location two-hander before the musical numbers grew it into something closer to a concert film wrapped around an intimate duet. [4]

The competitive question for A24 is Antoine Fuqua's Michael — a PG-13 wide release starring Jaafar Jackson as his uncle — which is the only unambiguous broad play on the Friday slate. [6] Mother Mary, Over Your Dead Body (Segel and Weaving, IFC), Fuze (David Mackenzie's R-rated London Blitz heist with Roadside and Saban), Dirty Hands, No Ordinary Heist, Broken Bird, I Swear, Desert Warrior, Two Seasons Two Strangers, and Kangaroo Island all run limited to mid-tier platform releases. [6] The Devil Wears Prada 2 lands in two weeks; ComingSoon's box-office analyst David Lang told the site Hathaway's promotional capacity was already constrained by that pending opening, characterizing her approach as "shrewd" — picking spots rather than saturating the market. [3] That timing problem is the marketing knock on the expansion.

The R rating and the explicit Madonna-adjacent pop melodrama put Mother Mary in a theatrical corridor where even a $4 million wide opening could translate into long tail: A24's best results come from films that hold screens rather than dominate openings. Hunter Schafer's presence brings a younger Trans/queer-coded audience; FKA Twigs' soundtrack contributions extend the music cross-promotion. If the expansion undershoots, it will likely be because the April 17 platform number bled critical coverage to Fuze and Over Your Dead Body's own press cycles — not because of Jackson's Michael.

Dense Fridays used to be theatrical accidents. Now they are streaming-adjacent decisions; A24's decision was to widen into the traffic, not around it.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles