Weekend Estimates by Klady & The Baby 2
Both estimates are likely high, but Fox outdid Disney, projecting a 3.8x Friday-to-weekend gross for The Boss Baby over a 3.7x ratio projected by Beauty & The Beast by Disney, even though the assumption would be that the soft opening of Smurfs: The Lost Village Opening would come out of Baby‘s hide more than Beauty‘s. The other wide opener, Going in Style, did okay, slotting into a space without many, if any, legitimate comparisons.
Fox’s 10-pack of releases from DreamWorks Animation is near its end, but going out strong with The Boss Baby looking like it will pass last summer’s Trolls, and with Captain Underpants on his way, hoping to be the Twilight of the under-13 set. It will be fascinating to see if Universal can bump the DWA franchise up a notch, which has never cracked $750m worldwide aside from Shrek films, to where Disney/Pixar and sometimes Illumination lives.
Beauty & The Beast will join the billion-dollar club this week. It’s doubled the #2 earner domestically (Logan). And it still has an outside shot at catching Frozen ($1.28b) to become Disney’s top princess film ever.
Smurfs: The Lost Village is the third of the series for Sony Animation and remains in line with grossing more than three-quarters of it revenues overseas, even on this opening weekend. If the opening projects out as the other two films did, this is a $300 million worldwide grosser, even with just $60m domestic.
Going in Style is one of those movies you want to root for… but… we’ll see. The opening isn’t deadly, but WB has to have the patience for the film to find its (old) audience.
Ghost in the Shell crashed this weekend. A 61% second weekend is not shocking for a big action film coming off a big opening. But this comes off a soft opening. And I wonder whether the studio legitimizing the whitewashing stories to explain last weekend’s opening had an impact. The issue may have gotten more air from that than from the original complaints. Either way… tough going for what will be remembered as an underrated (however imperfect) movie.
The Zookeeper’s Wife expanded nicely. Not excitingly, but nicely.
Fox Searchlight’s Gifted didn’t rock the world on its 56 screens, but the per-screen is pretty solid under the circumstances. Can word of mouth help it in expansion?
Colossal was the per-screen monster this weekend with $30k per, but Their Finest may be showing the stronger potential legs, with an appeal to older audiences.
And the indie that has done the most business that you are least likely to know about is Kedi, from Oscilloscope, which is about cats on the streets of Istanbul and is the small distributor’s #2 grosser of all time already.
Also, The Shack is on its way to matching last year’s top religious entry, Miracles from Heaven, as it becomes the fifth religious-audience-only niche film to do $60 million domestic in the past four years.
I you had bet me that Boss Baby would be the #1 movie 2 weeks in a row, that’s a gamble I’d have lost.
I suspect Colossal will continue to do well as people start to realize it’s not really the movie it’s been advertised as.
Colossal is tremenjus. Oh that closing shot.
Looking at the top of the charts reminds me of the clusterfuck of Oct/Nov 2011 when Puss in Boots opened 28/10 and then Happy Feet on 18/11 and Muppets, Hugo and Arthur Christmas all opened on 11/23.
Puss survived. The others didn’t break out domestically.
Forward to 2017 and B&TB and Boss Baby are thriving while Power Rangers is a miss but only due to its budget, but still sucking up family dollars, while Smurfs is left in the dust. So different result but when last have seen three movies aimed at the same audience occupy the top three positions?
Yeah. Power Rangers, just opened on the wrong damn day. These things find audiences, and here’s to Japan bailing it out.
Speaking of being bailed out. Ghost in the Shell, has close to 100 million internationally. If it’s close to three, when all is said and done, then this movie could be seen, as a marginal success! That’s how Paramount rolls, these days.