The winner (1)
Whether or not previews are included, Disney animation Big Hero 6 was the winner of the weekend, just ahead of fellow freshman Kingsman: The Secret Service. The Marvel adaptation took a healthy £3.81m over the weekend, and £4.29m including previews. The last major Disney animation was Frozen, which debuted towards the end of 2013 with £4.70m. (We don’t count either of 2014’s Tinker Bell features as a major Disney effort.)
An apt comparison for Big Hero 6 might be Wreck-It Ralph, which arrived in February 2013 with £4.53m. Wreck-It Ralph benefited from higher awareness of the arcade game source material, especially among adults. Big Hero 6, which opened in the US last November, has clocked up $218m there and $485m worldwide.
Big Hero 6 still has the whole February half-term holiday ahead of it – a period that should deliver hefty takings every day of the week.
The winner (2)
While nobody will be much surprised by the success of the latest Disney animation, the various stakeholders in Kingsman: The Secret Service will be mighty pleased to have given the inflatable robot a run for his money. Kingsman debuted with £3.55m over the weekend, and £4.24m including Thursday previews. That’s a big jump from the opening of director Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass, which began in April 2010 with £1.83m plus generous previews of £2.05m.
Distributor 20th Century Fox and producer/director/co-writer Vaughn will now be picking over the details of what went right. First candidate is the release date, since Kingsman offered cinemagoers a fun alternative to the many awards-worthy prestige dramas currently in cinemas. Vaughn is a director who manages to be both broadly commercial and also quite distinctive meaning that Fox could position Kingsman as both accessibly mainstream and something a bit different to what audiences had seen before. There is invariably value in that combination.
Although the film found a berth at all the indie chains – Picturehouse, Curzon and Everyman all played it – it has found its biggest success at multiplex venues, with a very good regional spread across the UK. Top site is Westfield in Shepherds Bush, London (so often the top-performing cinema for a hit film), with Vue West End in second place. But Cineworld Milton Keynes, Cineworld Glasgow, Showcase Bluewater, Cineworld Sheffield, Cineworld Crawley and Odeon Manchester Trafford Centre are all among the top 10 performing venues for Kingsman, and the next 10 includes plex cinemas in Edinburgh, Newcastle, Norwich, Cheltenham, Dublin and Liverpool.
Fox reports that, with Monday takings added in, Kingsman is now ahead of Big Hero 6, and the film should win the week overall. (Family films always deliver softer numbers on weekdays, outside school holiday periods.)
The indie alternative
The only Oscar contender released at the weekend was Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, which lands with £363,000 from 187 cinemas, and a £1,942 average. In terms of best-performing sites, the result is the exact opposite of Kingsman, with the film flourishing best in independent cinemas, notably the Curzon, Picturehouse and Everyman chains. The skew is more London-heavy, as you might expect for a prime slice of US indie.
The Inherent Vice number is highly comparable with box office for the first weekend of wide play for Anderson’s last film The Master: £372,000 from 153 cinemas. The Master was released on a single-screen, two-week platform in November 2012, expanding nationwide in week three.
The disappointment
Landing in lowly 19th place, with takings of £79,000 from 158 screens, Trash delivered a weak average of £501 per venue. That must surely come as a major disappointment to distributor Universal and the cinemas that supported the film. Rio de Janeiro-set Trash benefited from some commercial elements: director Stephen Daldry, screenwriter Richard Curtis, and a storyline that is ultimately uplifting. But perhaps these didn’t cohere so well with the film’s favela setting, plus the fact the three main actors are Brazilian kids, and the primary language is Portuguese. This balance between gritty and upbeat worked brilliantly for Slumdog Millionaire, and also Daldry’s Billy Elliot. In general, however, films targeting adult audiences (Trash is a 15 certificate) with child protagonists can fall between two stools. Slumdog Millionaire and Billy Elliot both arrived in cinemas with major buzz and critical acclaim, whereas Trash struggled to establish itself as a must-see proposition. Absent major awards attention, and boasting a MetaCritic score of 63/100, the film has seemingly got lost in the mix of titles chasing the specialised audience right now.
The big fallers
Quite a few of the awards contenders are showing signs of fatigue, with drops in excess of 50% for the likes of Birdman and Whiplash. But falls on those titles look positively modest when compared with some other films in the market. Johnny Depp misfire Mortdecai fell 82% from the previous weekend, while Mark Wahlberg in The Gambler dropped 81%. Both these titles are now likely to see drastic reductions in screen counts and showtimes.
The orphan
To no great surprise, Aussie thriller Son of a Gun landed pretty dismally, with £21,000 from 60 screens, and a £351 average. Starring Brenton Thwaites, Ewan McGregor and Alicia Vikander, the film falls between indie and mainstream, and just didn’t have the weight to punch through in the multiplex environment, where it achieved its bookings – it’s currently playing in 24 Vue sites, 15 Cineworlds, 11 Showcases and two Odeons. Having booked into these multiplex venues, distributor Koch now needs to hold back the DVD release for the full theatrical window of 17 weeks (in fact, the title goes on sale in June). The film’s natural home is DVD/on-demand, and, in an ideal world, a swifter transfer would be desirable.
The future
Overall, the market is 21% up on the previous frame, and also a healthy 47% up on the equivalent session from 2014, when The Wolf of Wall Street and 12 Years a Slave continued their hold on the top of the chart, and That Awkward Moment was the top new release. Cinema bookers will now have fingers crossed for the Wachowskis’ sci-fi adventure Jupiter Ascending, originally slated to release last summer. Following giant success with Paddington, StudioCanal could have another family-friendly hit on its hands with Shaun the Sheep the Movie. Sony has Seth Rogen and James Franco in The Interview, which certainly has a curiosity factor, since it was responsible for the devastating server hack towards the end of last year. One last major awards contender arrives in the shape of Selma, starring David Oyelowo.
Top 10 films, 30 January-1 February
1. Big Hero 6, £4,293,286 from 501 sites (new)
2. Kingsman: The Secret Service, £4,241,292 from 533 sites (new)
3. American Sniper, £1,586,745 from 481 sites. Total: £9,335,482
4. The Theory of Everything, £1,032,912 from 509 sites. Total: £16,643,178
5. Taken 3, £801,562 from 403 sites. Total: £16,560,282
6. Into the Woods, £734,370 from 488 sites. Total: £8,411,168
7. Paddington, £442,869 from 513 sites. Total: £35,517,698
8. Ex Machina, £410,327 from 410 sites. Total: £2,055,694
9. Inherent Vice, £363,133 from 187 sites (new)
10. Les Contes D’Hoffmann: Met Opera, £238,597 from 167 sites (live event)
Other openers
Trash, £79,178 from 158 sites
Eh Janam Tumhare Lekhe, £24,221 from 15 sites
Son of a Gun, £21,065 from 60 sites
Au Revoir les Enfants, £13,958 from 6 sites
Hawaizaada, £10,089 from 14 sites
No Manifesto: A Film About Manic Street Preachers, £3,624 from 3 sites
Pelo Malo, £1,995 from 3 sites
Tales of the Grim Sleeper, £1,958 from 3 sites
• Thanks to Rentrak
