Weekend Estimates by Klappie
What does one say about the weakest box office weekend of 2015 led by the weakest #1 grosser of any weekend in 2015?
Next weekend, Cinderella will push the market back into the top half of 2015 weekends. So goes the rollercoaster of release dates.
Before we allow the creeping terror of the “2015 box office would be crappy without American Sniper” spin, here is one very easy to chew stat. There has never been more than two $50 million+ openings in Jan-Mar (Q1) in the history of the film business. Considering the next two weekends (Cinderella/Insurgent) Q1 2015 will have FOUR. Add on top of that the remarkable expansion of American Sniper.
Want to expand the survey a bit, to $30 million openings? 2015 will come up one short of the record of 8 such openings, which has happened a couple of times. But then again, the budgets on this year’s 7 $30 million+ Q1 openers will be significantly less than either 2010 or 2012 (the year’s with 8 such openings).
Look… I am not arguing that this year’s early box office is world-beating, fat, rich excitement. But it is strong and solid. And arguing any kind of “trouble” is myopic and irrational.
The happiest story of the weekend was the opening of The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which topped any weekend of the original film and is in position to match or top the number of the first film domestically. The First Marigold made its larger fortune overseas, where it scored $90m. The Second is already has $20m in the bank chasing that number.
Kingsman: The Secret Service is not only on the tip of $100m domestically, but also, $250m worldwide.
The success of Still Alice is worth noting. It’s up to $14.7 million domestic. That outdoes both 2014 titles Foxcatcher and Whiplash. And it will likely outdo Sony Classics’ top 2013 title To Rome with Love ($16.7 million). It won’t come close to either of the recent SPC Woody Allen hits, Blue Jasmine or Midnight in Paris. But did anyone see a strong commercial play in this movie? I know that the first driving force for picking up the film at Toronto last year was the sense that Julianne Moore was sure to win the Oscar with it. But this is quite a happy upside… not just for SPC, but for the film and filmmakers, who have to be thrilled that their work is being so widely seen, even before post-theatrical.
Arthouse/limited release films were soft as well, with the re-issue of Grey Gardens doing the best per-screen on 1 ($11k) and Phillipine romantic drama Crazy Beautiful You doing $500k on 47 screens as a niche market smash.
That’s a surprisingly solid hold for Lazarus considering it’s a horror film. It’ll end up close to what Oculus (Another Blumhouse/Relativity production) made and it cost even less than that film.
Pretty sure “Chappie” is the lowest-grossing No. 1 debut since “End of Watch.”
Now that AMERICAN SNIPER is #1 domestically for 2014, we have a year where the top grosser domestically, worldwide and likely most profitable film theatrically were all different for probably the first time since 2007, with Mockingjay probably taking that crown if you split the $250 million budget of the production in two given TRANSFORMERS’ massive reliance on China (In ’07 Pirates 3 and Spidey 3 were the leaders, but Potter and Shrek were almost certainly more profitable given the budgets involved).
With that total, I shouldn’t have been so surprised to only have 3 other people in my showing of Unfinished Business this afternoon.
What really shocked me this week was 15 people at a showing of Seventh Son on Thursday afternoon.
Both flicks were better than I would have thought going in…but after seeing the critical response and box office, you go in with lowered expectations. Bad movies both but not completely unenjoyable.