Weekend Estimates by Leonard Joe Klady
This is one of those weekends that just made sense. No real surprises.
Fox was a little late on focusing on families as the target for The Three Stooges and, to my eye, left another $5m or more on the opening weekend table. But still, number was as expected.
Lionsgate kinda squirted out The Cabin in The Woods with a peek-a-boo ad campaign that didn’t reach beyond the already pre-sold Whedon lusting base. Symptomatic was the release date. Why would you open a film “From the director of The Avengers” and “starring Thor,” three weeks BEFORE The Avengers? I remember a bunch of years ago when The Machinist sold to Paramount Classics at Toronto and the producers insisted that the Christian Bale movie opened before Batman. Dumb ego. Is the goal to get people to see the film – in that case, really worth the effort – or to remain above such petty things? Just sayin’.
Lockout is another such oddity, if you believe, as I do, that Prometheus is going to make a major stamp on the summer. So this is the time to release a Guy Pearce action movie? Oy.
Bully expanded to 158 screens, doing good business for a doc, and not very good business for the amount of hype as a cultural event that it stirred up.
Perhaps a surprise, a soft opening for Intouchables in French Canadian cinemas. $7k per is a nice number, but not in the realm of the massive worldwide numbers for the film. Harvey, you’re at bat is coming.
And solid starts for Music Box’s Monsieur Lazhar and Strand’s Here.
It’s very cool Sony Classics released THE RAID that wide. It’s, in my opinion, a new action classic and loads of brutal, violent fun.
JEFF, WHO LIVES AT HOME is tremendous, the best Duplass film yet, and features great performances and an emotional wallop.
Good points David, regarding whether money was left on the table for Cabin. It reminds me of the Teen Wolf release strategy, which wisely waited for Back to the Future to come out first and then piggy back off of its expected success.
And as mentioned before, the marketing was subdued in not (as chucky would say) whoring themselves into promoting Joss and Thor more prominently.
21 Jumpstreet has really turned into a very leggy hit, and will surpass The Vow and Safe House very soon. I thought it was a very effective comedy, but it has exceeded my expectations, and most others I think. Going past $130m is a solid home run.
And I couldn’t help but groan when the Finkster wrote on her site “Overall the North American weekend looks to be down around -11% from last year which may make Hollywood nervous going into the all-important summer movie season starting in May after a super-heated 2012 first quarter.”
Aye-fucking-karumba.
Did the sci-fi aspect hurt Lockout? Or are that many people more willing to pay to see Liam Neeson and Jason Statham in action flicks from the Besson factory?
i agree whole heartedly. Cabin and Lockout would have made fantastic Late August releases after Prometheus and Avengers made a stamp and you ride the wake to some decent box office.
I think it would have benefited Lockout more than Cabin which always felt like a $15 million at best based on the campaign they ran. If they would have run a straight horror campaign and focused on the undead killing machines/texas chainsaw style vibe, it could have been a little stronger.
Still, Cabin in the Woods is such a strange film that i guarantee word of mouth will only hurt it. It’s too smart for it’s own good. But isn’t that always the case with Whedon.
Am I the only one here who is a little stunned by TITANIC’s second-week success at the international box-office?
According to the Hollywood Reporter, the movie earned $88 million at the international box-office this weekend, 58 of those came from China alone, making it the biggest opening in that country. That’s more money than the original Titanic earned in China during its entire run 15 years ago.
Titanic has already made 146 million internationally in 12 days (and could eventually reach around 80 in the US). Does this mean it could reach 450 at the global box-office? Or more?
Yeah word of mouth will be brutal for Cabin, even by horror standards. As I mentioned in the Friday thread, four people walked out halfway through and there were only 20 or so people in attendance. I don’t see walkouts very often.
Speaking solely for myself, it was refreshing to see a distributor not give away the whole house during the pre-release promotion of a movie for once. I’m sure if it had come out in 2010 as originally planned, MGM would have sold it completely wrong and it wouldn’t have gotten half the opening weekend it got this weekend. Plus, it would have neither been “starring Thor” nor “From the director of The Avengers” at that point.
Steven Kar… the film never opened in China or Russia in its first run. So no. Not surprised at all. $400 – $500m was anticipated (not that Fox isn’t relieved to actually be racking the numbers up).
The only real story here, to me, is that US numbers are soft… and is it 3D’s fault?
In other words, would a proper launch of a 4K digital print of Titanic have made more money domestically? And is it time for the studios to start considering doing 3D internationally and not at home or only as a “limited edition” in the US?
I agree that it would have opened to $8m in 2010, Ed.
Not sure that’s relevant to its opening this weekend.
I agree that it’s nice to see a movie marketed without giving everything away. But you can bet that Lionsgate would have traded that away for a $25m opening in a second.
I can’t imagine LOCKOUT would have benefitted from being released after PROMETHEUS — Pearce is hardly in it. And he plays an executive who does nothing but talk — not sure people would see a few minutes of that and think “Yeah, I want to see that guy play an action hero!” Now, maybe if LOCKOUT starred Fassbender, who is one of the PROMETHEUS leads…
Poland,
What do you mean TITANIC never opened in China?
The following is according to the Hollywood Reporter:
In China, the film’s six-day opening gross is 32 percent ahead of the lifetime earnings of Titanic, which cumed $44 million when released in China in 1998, itself a record for more than a decade.
David, everyone whose seen Titanic has seen it, and those who loved it went to see it again. The 3D may have kept them home but there’s probably a cap on the number of people in the US who really want to see this film again in a theatre. Abroad, it seems, the spectacle still gets people in the theatre.
I was told by Paramount that it had not opened in China. I assumed they knew.
And JSP – You’re kidding, right? Mr Superhero Movie is talking about how They love spectacle?
Are you kidding David? Saving the world in a superhero film is different from watching one of the greatest maritime disasters unfold on screen in this big ridiculous romantic spectacle. It’s why Cameron plays to people because he somehow, no matter how smaltzy, gets to people and they turn out in droves. Especially in China, they love Cameron over there.
ETA: Oh yeah, Mr. Superhero Movie? Really? You folks don’t get behind a genre and I do (Of course most of you folks are horror fans but that’s a horse of a different color), and you give me shit for it. Fine David, you can be Mr. Pete Berg because you know you’re going to love Battleship :P!
Didn’t Paramount and Fox split distribution on Titanic? Paramount getting domestic and Fox getting international? So maybe Paramount is not the best source for international release info.
I lived in China for a few months in 2003. It was a rural area nearly an hour from a large city. I was completely taken aback by the Titanic adoration. Obviously I knew it was a massive hit globally, but I never expected 10 year-old Chinese kids to be wearing Titanic jackets and begging me to sing My Heart Will Go On for them. It was something else.
Wow. Cabin in the Woods was just so damned much fun. Might go back again this evening.
That new CABIN IN THE WOODS poster is the worst for a major interesting release in some time. Going for the SCREAM crowd apparently.
A late Monday LAT posting by Amy Kaufman, reporting the greater number of screens for this release: “Paul Hanneman, co-president of Fox International, attributed some of the film’s success in China to the fact that the original played in only 180 theaters in 1998, compared with 3,500 for this year’s 3-D release. But he also said Chinese moviegoers have responded to the romance between the characters played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.”
Saw RAID this afternoon. Good picture, but more than just a bit overpraised. It’s essentially Johnnie To’s BREAKING NEWS with the plot stripped away, becoming an exercise in killing the maximum number of people possible given the set-up. The martial arts fights are old-school, mid-80s Jackie Chan/Sammo Hung/Yuen Biao–that’s actually a plus–but after the 14th or 15th guy gets shot in the head in close-up with a CGI blood spray, it starts losing its effectiveness. Still, compared to most U.S. action films, it’s almost a masterpiece.
And BTW, kudos to the MPAA for giving this an R, proving once again that their tolerance for extreme violence is sky-high.