Weekend Estimates by 20 Years Later Klady
Pretty nice box office weekend overall.
Let’s start with… Warner Bros is kicking itself this weekend. Not only did they lose out on a relatively cheap hit movie, but they gave up on a franchise that defined their New Line division. There were only fifteen $100m domestic movies in the history of New Line and D&D was one of them. Look for the long slumbering resurrection of The Mask to suddenly heat up.
This is also an excellent way to track the change in the box office from 20 years ago until today. The 1994 movie was #1 for 4 weekends through the Christmas movie period, opening on December 16. The top weekend gross by D&D during that run was $16.4 million. What is roughly the same weekend last year had 3 or 4 (depending on which weekend you choose to match) films grossing over $16 million and one of those films grossing over $30 million.
Comparing this opening to other openings in the second weekend of November hammock, you find almost all franchise films trying to squeeze an extra week in before a Thanksgiving Day payoff. Twilight, Potter, Bond. 2012 and Happy Feet are the the anomalies. And then, you have D&D2. In that company, D&D2 is an extremely impressive opening.
More to come…
3:26p – Apologies. My Firefox browser has become unwieldy and it seems I have to switch to another. Trying Chrome now.
Big Hero 6 has the 2nd best 10-day number for a November Disney animation release behind only Frozen. There have only been 3 Pixar releases in November and BH6 is behind 2 of them, The Incredibles and Toy Story 2, though just barely on the latter. So things are going quite well, if not singularly.
Interstellar is doing well… though it’s 3rd and 4th weekend are not going to intimidate Hunger Games or even Horrible Bosses Deux. The film should hit $100m domestic tomorrow. The film’s already at $224m internationally, so they are doing well there. If you look at Inception, from the time the film had a $28m weekend, there would only be another $55m in the tank. And that film only had one drop of over 40% before weekend 13 domestically, so I don’t foresee anything better for Interstellar. Even with Thanksgiving coming, $150 million domestic seems the likely domestic total… maybe $160m. Worldwide, $600 million would be a positive-leaning total. Not chickenfeed. But it’s against a very big investment.
Action movies took the biggest hit in the Top 20 this weekend. Not brutal, but decent holds across the board for the other genres.
Birdman continues to lead the limited scene on 857 screens with an estimated $2,830 per and $2.4 million.
Foxcatcher opened on 6 screens to a strong $46k per screen. The hard road for this excellent-but-challenging film is ahead.
Rosewater opened on 371 screens and did a nice $3,180 per for $1.2 million.
The Homesman did $11.5k per on 5 screens, which is not bad.
And Nightcrawler, which feels pretty indie, but is on 2103 screens, pulled in another $2.9 million and is just under $25m so far.
Godard’s Goodbye To Language continues to draw a hardcore crowd.
Don’t you think it should be Paramount who should be kicking themselves this weekend? Interstellar is looking like it could do well over $500 overseas…..and they gave up ALL overseas grosses to retain Friday the 13th and SouthPark franchises?? I’m curious Dave because you would obviously know a lot better than most of us: what WAS the split on that unusual deal between Paramount and WB? Because if it was 50/50 on the cost, then Paramount lost big time….and I’m sorry, it was obvious all along that there was going to be a domestic ceiling on this movie. It looks now that it will probably do about $170 to $190 domestic, which is actually pretty good……comparisons to Inception are bullshit, I don’t know the pundits keep using that. For one thing, you have DiCaprio vs. McConnahey as the star and I get that the latter just got his Oscar and all of this publicity, but the fact is even in his heydey of romantic comedies, McConnehey never opened a film above $25 million.
That said, it DOES look like that outside of the Interstellar give-away, it now looks like Paramount is becoming what Fox became just a few years ago: a studio that looks at domestic grosses as the loss leader. TMNT, Noah, Wolf of Wall Street, Transformers…..all of these films have done solid in the U.S., but really made their bank overseas.
And speaking of Fox, what a fantastic year they are having….even compared to Disney! They now have EIGHT of the top 20 highest grossing films for the year worldwide, all eight films grossing over $300 million and some of those films were GENUINELY reasonable (Maze Runner, Fault in our Stars, even Gone Girl) when it came to production costs. And that’s not even including Exodus and Night at the Museum which could possibly make $1 billion worldwide combined.
And don’t look know but NEXT year could easily be Universal’s year, even when you factor in that Disney has a new Avengers and Star Wars coming: they have Furious 6, Minions, Jurassic World, along with Pitch Perfect and Ted sequels……taking in the costs of these films into account, I’ll bet they could see a much more profitable year than even Disney.
Oh and at this point, it looks very likely that Nightcrawler could end up outgrossing Birdman…..any possibility that film sees some awards traction outside of a nomination for Gyllenhaal? Fantastic movie that I feel is the film that Drive wanted to be. And it also looks like the Weinsteins are doing their magic with St. Vincent which could end up clearing $50 million domestic if it gets some serious nominations – I think you have to give SOME credit to Melissa McCarthy for pulling up the grosses, she really has become a genuine draw at this point.
What parallels do you see between Drive and Nightcrawler? I agree that the latter is fantastic. Gyllenhaal is outstanding. Would love to see him get a Best Actor nom.
I think he means they’re both set in Los Angeles, shot digitally, and feature some crime. But yeah, it seems like a bit of a stretch to say that one wants to be the other. The lead performances are nearly opposites for most of the running time. I loved both, for the record.
I know it’s a stretch but I can definitely sense from BOTH that they’re going for a William Friedkin/Michael Mann/’80’s LA crime thriller vibe….and with Drive, I think it overwhelms the movie to the point where it just feels like a gimmick (though I LOVE that soundtrack) while with Nightcrawler, it doesn’t get in the way of the story or performances.
With Drive, sure, I can see the comparisons to Friedkin and Mann. But not so much with Nightcrawler, with its emphasis on the modern media and the deranged loner and the anything goes entrepreneurial spirit stemming from the floundering economic conditions (and lack of moral compass). I didn’t get much of an ’80s crime thriller vibe while watching Nightcrawler.
Weegee would also get to the crime scene before the police and move bodies around to suit the photographic frame