Weekend Estimates by Klady – Carolling, Goating & Precious, Oh My
So A Christmas Carol becomes the second target of “it’s soft” b.s. b.o. chatter in two weeks with an opening right in range with the best Christmas film openings ever, save only The Grinch That Stole Christmas, which opened to $55m the week before Thanksgiving in 2000. The hold over the weekend was good and the minimum for the film, domestically, now looks like $120 million… it’s high about $160 million… with Avatar in the way of any real chance to become all-time #3 for the genre, beating Elf and behind The Polar Express and Grinch, as most of the the 3D screens will be gone two weekends before Christmas.
#2 at the box office, by estimate, is last weekend’s false whipping boy, This Is It, which held much stronger on Saturday than on Friday. Domestically, the film will be the #1 concert film of all-time domestically and the film already has that honor overseas, where Sony estimates this weekend to take it to $128.6m over there. That puts this “disappointment” at more than 2.5x the Miley Cyrus concert film worldwide, the previous record holder and well past Woodstock, whose numbers seem to be a bit blurry, appropriately.
No new notions on The Men Who Stare At Goats. It’s a solid opening for a Clooney film without mega-marketing or a superstar ensemble.
The hold on Paranormal Activity, at 49% this week, is impressive to me. For the film to be doing $8.4 million at this point, it needs to be drawing in people who are still curious enough to pass on the big new titles, including The Fourth Kind, which did a little better in its opening than this week of PA, but to me, PA is more impressive.
Some may see $7.7m for The Box as a disaster, but not I. Warners was fairly conservative in budgeting the marketing… which might have been a misstep. But for Richard Kelly, this is a big number… a mainstream number. And regardless of what the movie is, the broad concept of this film was, to my eye, marketable. Truth is, Warners shouldn’t be doing movies like this. It’s just not a strength.
The Precious number, per-screen, is truly unique. The comparable numbers, beyond the animated films that have been opened exclusively just before massive wide releases, are Dreamgirls and Brokeback Mountain… but those screen counts were 2 and 5, respectively. And even the animated openings were all 6 screens or less. So to do over $100k per-screen on 18 screens is a singular event.
What does it mean? Well, obviously, the heavy publicity push via Oprah and a willing media corps has reached the core audience and made this a must-go this weekend. But what is also unusual about this film is that they rolled it out so early in the season… that is, the holiday season. Both of those other giant per-screen openers opened in December and went on to get strong results over the MLK weekend holiday and then again, with Oscar noms, extending those runs. The timing of the Precious release puts a bit more pressure on the film to perform and maintain in a crowded field going into Thanksgiving.
Slumdog opened a weekend later last season – presumably, the template for Lionsgate on this – stayed under 100 screens until December, then under 1000 screens until nominations. The film did 68% of its business after those nominations. But Precious has already busted out of that paradigm, grossing more this weekend than Slumdog did in its first 14 days. So that comparison doesn’t seem likely to hold either.
Bottom Line: I don’t know. No one knows. The history of heated openings like this zig zags between box office smashes and box office not-bads, Oscar nominees and the Oscar forgotten. The good news, commercially, is that no film with a per-screen over $75k on opening weekend has grossed less than $40 million domestic.
The less thrilling news is that when you look at American Beauty, No Country For Old Men, and Dances With Wolves, the three Oscar winners with the biggest per-screens at opening, they also opened on more than 10 screens (16, 28, 14, respectively) and all opened to less than half the Precious per-screen. How can it be bad to do better than those films, you ask, especially when No Country and Wolves both opened in early November? Well, the answer is that this kind of overwhelming launch can suggest a well-sold, hard core of interest, but not necessarily the kind of wide popularity that wins Oscars.
But again… I don’t know. These numbers are singular and only time will turn speculation into even a well-educated guess.
Performance of PRECIOUS is ….. wow! I think it will have chance to gross more than $100 million in the United States.
Good to see that THE BOONDOCK SAINTS II: ALL SAINTS DAY continue to do well in modest theatrical release. It is overcoming bad reviews and becoming one of the higher-grossing Sony’s lay-offs. Looks like Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions Group will release more films through Apparition in the future. (Personally, I wish more films from Stage 6 will receive modest theatrical releases)
Yes I can barely stand the wait for the next Troy Duffy masterpiece.
I like that marychan doesn’t even try to disguise her vested interest in Stage 6 or Duffy.
Man I ate it on “This Is It.” The fanboy effect didn’t take hold at all.
But again I don’t get how characterizing this opening for a movie with a quarter billion dollar budget as soft is BS. Again maybe it’ll do 5x opening. For now though, this is not good. IF “Elf” was made with a give times biggest budget, would it have been regarded as a success??? “Terminator:Salvation” which earned $125 million, and “Wild Wild West,” which earned $113 million on similar budgets, were certainly not.
Also what “genre” would it be #3 in…motion-capture? Certainly not Xmas movies…
FYI the record for a movie opening in 10 theatres or more was $63,000 per theatre by “Blair Witch.”
five times bigger budger*
I really love to watch many types of films; I would be happy to see more types of films to get theatrical releases.
I also think that $7.7m for “The Box” isn’t a disaster. Warner Bros only has a minority stake in “The Box”. By limiting P&A spends, Warner Bros should be able to make profit on their investment.
Ethan, are you suggesting Christmas Carol’s budget was over $200 million? I doubt that very much. Maybe with P&A, but a 30 mill opener on a 200+ mill budget is not great IMO. Doubt the budget was much over 150 though.
Couples Retreat dropped 0.5% in its fifth weekend. Is there any precedence for that tiny a drop in a fifth non-holiday weekend? As for Precious, I’m astonished. On the list of top-per screen averages, it had the 19th largest number of theaters. Of course, now expect the rival studios and/or tabloid pundits to pull out every possible form of Precious backlash from now until February, with tons of white writers carping about how offensive the movie is to black people, black women, overweight black women, etc.
Wow, I just looked at that, Precious pulled in $2 million in… 18 theaters?? There may be a precedent for a box office sellout like that, but I can’t remember it.
Did anybody else catch the press release about Bob Zemeckis being given an award for most successful “live-action 3-D director of all time”?
Strikes me as a massive stretch to call any of his 3-D movies “live-action.”
It’s funny, Scott… your comment about Precious is exactly what might kill Precious.
When no one is allowed to have an opinion other than the politically correct one, that is when a real backlash starts to happen.
Brokeback Mountain was not as universally loved as some wanted the world to think and a lot of the loss to Crash was about Academy members saying, quietly, “I am not going to be forced to vote for that movie that I really didn’t like that much.” And I think that some real homophobia came to the surface, not because the “gay” gigglers hate gay people – indeed, some of their best friends are gay – but because self-seriousness of those who loved the film created a need to rebel… even in inappropriate ways.
Do you really want to take the position that many black people will not be bothered by the film and that the only way that story can happen is if devious whites force the issue?
This is why I went on weeks ago about the use of the word “backlash” about the film. It is hugely misleading. When backlash comes because more than a tiny select group sees the film, is that backlash or just “lash?” (You know my answer.)
Thing is, studios and consultants planting negativity can’t stop a movie that is genuinely well-liked, as A Beautiful Mind and Slumdog Millionaire showed. And positive spin can’t make a not-as-well-liked movie a winner.
If Precious is The Movie, it will become The Movie without the hype changing things. The hype opened the movie and will get Academy members to watch the movie, which can be the biggest challenge for a small film. Is The Academy racist? In part. But the degree to which that matters will not be defined by backlash. It will be defined by the movie.
I wasn’t into the business side of movies in 1985 the way I am now, (I was 17) but with all this talk of Oscar and PRECIOUS, and the backlash/lash that may result from a nomination, I wondered what was the mood of critics and the general public to the shut out of The Colour Purple, the none-nomination of Spielberg for Best Director, even though TCP got the most nominations, and was their any accusations of racism leveled against the Academy in that day?
Also, just one more question. Has any black person ever been nominated for Best Director? I checked out Spike Lee and it seems he was nominated for writing DO THE RIGHT THING.
John Singleton for BOYZ N THE HOOD.
I just looked through the nominees for Best Director since 1992, and it’s kind of ridiculous, but Lee Daniels will (probably) be the first black nominee since Singleton. Does that mean there’s only been one black nominee for Director in the history of the Oscars?
I think that’s right. But what more recent efforts have been overlooked? Since 1992, I can think of two – Lee (Malcolm X) and Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou). Anything else?
If anything/anyone destroys “Precious”‘s Oscar chances, it’ll
be EW for killing it with their nauseating brand of condescending/p.c. overkill kindness.
I’m predicting a minimum of two EW “Precious” covers between now and Oscar nite.
I said two months ago that “Precious” seemed destined to be the Oscar front-runner. And nothing opening between now and December 31st looks remotely threatening to its top-dog status.
“Up in the Air” probably ranks #2, but it will lose for the same reason “Jerry Maguire” did in 1996: an idiotic perception that it’s somehow too “lightweight” to earn its gold statuary.
Not that I’m a huge fan of the movie, but Fuqua (spelling?) for Training Day?
I would say F. Gary Gray for Friday, but that’s not really plausible. It’s shameful that Lee wasn’t nominated for Malcom X or Do The Right Thing
Carl Franklin for One False Move? The Hughes Brothers for Menace II Society?
With 10 noms for best picture this year, I’m finding it very hard to find ten that are better than UP, DISTRICT 9 and THE HANGOVER. Also with their being a separate category for animation, does this now mean that no animated movie will ever agin be nominated for Best Picture?
THE HANGOVER is a pipe dream I know, but I bet if it was a serious crime drama, no comedic elements involved, it would’ve been a contender. I seem to recall that there was some debate about A FISH CALLED WANDA being omitted from the Best Picture noms in 1989.
‘their’ should be ‘there’.
Big congratulations to Lionsgate on “Precious”…must be their ethnic diversity…such a wide range of blonde women expertise to draw upon
“Brothers” (Palen) and “Precious” (Greenberg) awards campaign here we come
First off, I’ve already seen a few articles of the nature I described. And they were all written in the ‘when did you stop beating your wife?’ vein. There has also been at least one genuinely insightful article questioning a component of the movie, but written by people who actually know of what they speak (it involves illiteracy). Let’s just say I sincerely hope the majority of ‘Is Precious offensive to X?’ articles are written by ‘X’ or contain actual insight from ‘X’. For example, it was literally a week after Transformers 2 opened before I heard a comment about the jive-talking robots from actual African-American moviegoers. As always when I bring up stuff like this, I’d love to be wrong.
UP being nominated for best picture is just weird. Unless you figure that it will be excluded from the animated film category for Ponyo, Monsters Vs Aliens, and Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs. Which is even more weird. So if it’s nominated for both categories, then it’s obvious it will win it’s one award in Best Animated, and that will be it. Which would be a shame. So, yeah, the top 10 thing is going to be weird. If the Wild Things are ignored. I may have to go Carol on something.
Fantastic Mr. Fox for Best Animated. Not gonna happen, but would rule.
IO – Wild Things oughta get some technical noms, but I suspect that’ll be it. It’s too unconventional for the Academy.
Maybe, MAYBE Best Adapted Screenplay. Longshot, but conceivable.
Which brings up another question…
If Star Trek were to a pursue a Best Screenplay nod, would it be Adapted or Original?
It would be Ridiculous.
Luke, strange as it may seem, STAR TREK would probably be ruled an original. It uses established characters, but the storyline is moreorless new, unlike the first TREK movie or MIAMI VICE (or, going back a few years, GUNN), which were simply expanded remakes of TV episodes.
That wouldn’t surprise me TOO much — I mean, I’m guessing THE FUGITIVE was eligible for Original Screenplay.
This seems a bit trickier, in that it’s technically remaking a bunch of existing story elements…but I guess TRANSFORMERS would be too, were it remotely eligible in a parallel world. Or THE DARK KNIGHT.
If I were to be super-pedantic, I could say that the WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE movie bears as much resemblance to the book as STAR TREK does to the original series.
But I like both, and so will leave it alone.
But what of Before Sunset, seen as adapted merely because of the same characters? But then after 2002’s abomination of an “original” screenplay category (Greek Wedding, Gangs of New York) who the hell knows.
BEFORE SUNSET was considered adapted? That is an idiotic call. Equivalent of saying SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE was adapted because “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” is an existing show.
The WGA nominated THe Fugitive in its adaptation category.
“I seem to recall that there was some debate about A FISH CALLED WANDA being omitted from the Best Picture noms in 1989.”
Oh, don’t bring up the 1988 Best Picture nominees. It’s one of my favorite years in film, and the Academy chose to highlight tedious dramas Mississippi Burning, Accidental Tourist and Dangerous Liaisons (I didn’t mind Rain Man or Working Girl).
But it was a year for the Academy to think outside the box: there were multiple deserving nominees in both the action genre (Die Hard, Midnight Run) and comedy genre (A Fish Called Wanda, Coming to America, Bull Durham).
“But it was a year for the Academy to think outside the box…”
uh, have you not met ‘the academy’, who’s reluctance to leave their super-comfy box in which they gleefully pooh-pooh comedy and action is legend?
oops typin to fast, “whose” reluctance
“too” fast, the dreaded 3peat of stupidity
“Equivalent of saying SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE was adapted because “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” is an existing show.”
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not, but SLUMDOG was in fact based on a novel.