Weekend Estimates by 3 Days To Klady
Historically, the only 1st Quarter movies to get to $150m faster than The Lego Movie were The Hunger Games, The Passion of the Christ, Oz The Great & Powerful, and Alice in Wonderland. $200m should come next Friday or Saturday, pushing it ahead of Alice on the speed clock to that landmark. Lego is actually well ahead of Frozen‘s 3rd wide weekend cume, will be ahead again after its 4th weekend, but will probably fall back to even with Frozen because Frozen‘s 5th weekend was Christmas/New Years week, in which it actually grew 45%. So Lego will not likely reach the $350m+/potentially $400m+ range of Frozen or come close to The Hunger Games‘ $408m or even the The Passion‘s $371m domestic, but has a real shot at catching/passing Alice in Wonderland‘s $335m domestic to become the 3rd biggest Q1 movie in history. That’s not nothing. In fact, it’s as huge as the hype. Perhaps more huge. Sue Kroll and WB Marketing proves once again that when they have a movie that catches the zeitgeist, they can hit it way, way out of the park.
Speaking of zeitgeist, Frozen passed Despicable Me 2 this weekend to not only become the #1 animated film of 2013 and the #3 domestic release of 2013, but has gotten there with enough steam to make a run at the Top 2 domestic box office grossers of 2013 (Iron Man 3 and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire).
Don’t be surprised if The Oscars opens with Ellen DeGeneres doing a Frozen bit… maybe with a bow and arrow from Hunger Games to boot.
I don’t think I mentioned when it happened that American Hustle is now David O. Russell’s highest-grossing domestic movie (and will likely be his biggest worldwide as well). The Wolf of Wall Street is Scorsese’s biggest worldwide hit and will not likely be his top domestic grosser (still $20m behind The Departed). Gravity is Alfonso Cuarón’s biggest domestic hit, beating out his Harry Potter movie by $20 million so far (and will never catch Potter‘s $65m ww advantage). 12 Years A Slave is now a $119 million worldwide grosser, easily Steve McQueen’s biggest in all territories. Captain Phillips has done more than double what any Paul Greengrass movie not called Bourne has done worldwide and triple domestically. So if you add some perspective to the Oscar group, the numbers look even better.
Have I mentioned 3 Days To Kill or Pompeii yet? No. Well, why would I?
On the arthouse circuit, the two winners were The Wind Rises and Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me with estimated/reported per-screens between $12k and $14k.
The only problem for LEGO, if you really can call it a problem, is it isn’t really sticking overseas, which is weird, because for some reason I thought Legos were popular all over the world. So it’ll probably end up with the gross of “Rio” or on the high end, “The Croods” worldwide. Not bad by any means especially with the low budget, but not a phenomenon like “Frozen” on the global level, or even the “Ice Age” sequels.
Also, “HOBBIT 2” might still have a shot at $1 billion worldwide. If the rest of its Chinese run matches its massive opening on the lines of the first movie, and it has a similar rise in Japan, it would be really close. No franchise has three separate $1 billion films. LOTR, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean and Batman all have two.
I’m not surprised that “Endless Love” collapsed this weekend (WOM couldn’t have been very good), but a comparable plummet for “ALN” is
mildly perplexing.
Could opening weekend audiences have really hated it that much?
Kind of hard to believe since it’s lightly likable fluff.
Even the worst Tyler Perry movies have had better second weekend holds.
A bad drop, to be sure, but an outsized Valentine’s Day skews things.
You’d almost think there was a federal law outlawing anyone from seeing last weekend’s openers after President’s Day.
Obama!!!
Lego hitting $200 million… well, at any point before this week does NOT in fact put it “ahead of Alice” on the speed clock, though. Alice had an $84 million second weekend and had almost $100 million more than Lego through this point in its run. Lego could very well hold on better and make it close to Alice’s final gross, but it’s not running ahead of it yet.
Jesse, Alice had about $64 million in its second weekend and then $34 million in its third weekend….just looked it up at Box Office Mojo. At this point, Alice is about $80 million ahead which is probably too much to catch but it had much weaker word of mouth and its drops were much steeper….I’m guessing that Lego doesn’t catch it, but I can see it just getting over $300 million if Peabody and Sherman doesn’t completely clobber it in a couple of weeks.
It IS interesting that the international is not as strong, BUT….Frozen has been dominating overseas the past several weeks and I’m guessing that Warners should have waited a little longer to roll it out overseas. Still this could end up doing over $650 million worldwide easily which is not as much as Frozen, but keep in mind it also cost less than half as much too. Which is perplexing…how the hell did this movie only cost $60 million???
Regardless, Warners knows that opening the sequel Memorial Day the next time around could easily get it an Despicable or Ice Age-sized international expansion and there’s no reason they can’t come closer to a billion worldwide with the sequel. But I have to think that Warners is going to find other avenues to capitalize on this BEFORE 2017…..do they have ownership over all of the direct-to-home Lego titles?
$650 mil for LEGO seems like a stretch with PEABODY adopting such an agressive rollout though the latter is bound to be the loser overall. Mr. Sherman expands to Germany, Central Europe, Brazil and Mexico next weekend with 75% percent of the globe covered by the following week. Unfortunately, Fox can’t push back PEABODY because Blue Sky’s “Rio 2” starts opening March 20.
“Frozen” has kind of put a damper on overseas animation prospects for the spring releases, also evidenced by the fact Dreamworks hasn’t reported weekend results for “Peabody” yet. LEGO annihilated it in the UK last weekend, and doubled “Peabody’s” debut in France from last weekend in its own opening this weekend. Yikes. Dreamworks might want to re-think the 3-movies a year thing if it’s too crowded in a year without Pixar, especially with Fox going nuts handling Blue Sky and now apparently Reel FX’s (the studio that did “Free Birds”) new movie this Fall. At least “Dragon 2” is up next.
Oh, yeah, sorry, that was an $84 million second full week for Alice, not the second weekend. Even so: not as if Alice suffered enormous drops that makes it super-likely Lego will catch up. For a movie that a certain segment of the internet likes to believe everyone despised, it fell over 50% all of twice in its dozen or so weekends as a wide release. Alice’s 46% second-weekend drop off of a $116 million opening is pretty decent.
Not that it matters that much. I loved Lego and it deserves the $300 million and change it’s cruising towards. Just weird how loose DP can be with numbers sometimes.
And yeah, I’m shocked DreamWorks thought they could sustain two cartoons a year (which is how it’s shaking out so far), let alone three (which seems to be the tentative plan going forward), especially with Disney and Pixar and BlueSky and Illumination and various other programmer slot-filler upstarts. Maybe if DreamWorks had a little more variety in their style beyond making the occasional Chris Sanders movie (Dragon, Croods) that’s actually decent, and/or the occasional celeb-filled comedy that isn’t as bad as it could have been (Megamind, Madagascar 3).
THIS SUMMER is why Fox took on Dreamworks….if they can’t get ‘Dragon to over $700 million worldwide with the only animated competition from a ‘Planes sequel, then it wasn’t worth it….that film has the potential to be HUGE.
But animated sequels just seem SO hit-or-miss it’s hard to tell….for every Despicable Me 2, there seems to be a Kung Fu Panda 2 and there just seems to be no relationship to quality or reviews at all. I mean Happy Feet 2 seemed damn surefire and it couldn’t even break $100 million domestic??
That’s true re: “Dragon” though they lucked out since there was going to be a Pixar movie about Dinosaurs due Memorial Day. “Dragon” would have been the heavyweight regardless, but that would have been some really direct competition.
“Panda 2” did manage to outgross the first due to overseas, but yeah you’re probably right, they are hoping for some ICE AGE 2-4 numbers for “Dragon,” the “Panda” sequels and “Madagascar” spin-off. IMO Fox should have moved DRAGON back to Memorial Day once Pixar left town, and moved “Rio 2” to July both to avoid competition with PEABODY/LEGO and to have a movie set in Rio De Janeiro during the World Cup during the time, you know, there’s a World Cup in Rio wrapping up.
I thought panda 2 actually increased worldwide over panda. The fact that it didn’t open to #1 was more about scheduling than it was about quality or interest. As for fox aren’t some profits guaranteed as simply the distributor?
@Hcat, very likely though not necessarily. They collect 8% of Dreamworks’ box office and DVD/Blu-Ray revenue, and 6% of Digital/VOD rev which is lower than under Paramount. Since Fox pays for marketing, which is usually a $100 million worldwide effort for big movies like this, there’s a good chance they lose money on a flick like “Turbo.”
Does anyone know if it is Fox or Dreamworks that chooses the dates? Just that even though they had a thriving animation department (and a ton of live action family film success) I can see why Fox would bring in DWA if only because it would be better to have them on their team than be competing against them.
Goodbye, Harold Ramis. And thank you for contributing to so much happiness during the course of your career.
‘Do you have any hobbies?’ ‘I collect spores, moulds and fungus’.
I’d say there was a correlation between quality and box office for “Happy Feet 2,” Geoff. It was godawful and cynical.