Prestige movie smackdown
Having earned a combined 14 stars from the Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw, three major awards contenders faced off at the UK box office at the weekend: Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, Scott Cooper’s Black Mass and Todd Haynes’s Carol. The intended audiences could roughly be categorised as, respectively, older; male/multiplex; female/arthouse. But clearly there was always going to be a big overlap.
The reported numbers are skewed by previews, but going strictly by the Friday-to-Sunday period, the cold war thriller Bridge of Spies did best, with £1.48m from 531 cinemas. Gangster biopic Black Mass, released into a slightly more cautious 441 cinemas, took £905,000. And period romantic drama Carol, much tighter with a rollout into 206 venues, grossed £480,000. So site averages are £2,780 for Bridge of Spies, £2,053 for Black Mass and £2,328 for Carol. See the Top 10 chart below for how those opening grosses look including previews.
For comparison, Spielberg’s last film, Lincoln, debuted in the UK in January 2013 with £1.66m – 13% ahead of the Bridge of Spies pace. If Bridge of Spies’ previews are added in, its opening figure is just ahead of that Lincoln number. Hanks was last in Saving Mr Banks, which opened more or less exactly two years ago with £796,000.
As for Black Mass, featuring Johnny Depp as real-life Boston gangster Whitey Bulger, it’s hardly fair to compare it with any of the actor’s recent films: Mortdecai, Into the Woods, Transcendence, The Lone Ranger, Dark Shadows, The Rum Diary. However, Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, in which he played real-life mobster John Dillinger, is an apt comparison. That one began with £1.59m (76% ahead of Black Mass), plus £635,000 in previews.
Director Haynes has a rather patchy commercial track record in the UK. His biggest hit is Far from Heaven, which began with a very comparable £452,000 from 195 cinemas, although ticket prices, of course, were lower in 2003. Cate Blanchett’s last starring role was in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, which debuted in September 2013 with £793,000 from 188 venues, plus £41,000 in previews.
The Good Dinosaur ambles out of the gate
The Good Dinosaur debuted very much at the softer end of Pixar’s range: an opening of £2.93m compares very unfavourably with £7.38m for Inside Out’s first session in July this year.
Animated and family films traditionally open to capitalise on school holiday periods, when box office revenues quickly pile up. Christmas is a different case, with films traditionally landing relatively softly in November, then playing solidly into and through the holiday period. Disney anticipates this trajectory for The Good Dinosaur. Two years ago, it released Frozen in early December, achieving £4.70m in the opening frame. That film went on to earn £40m, a multiple of 8.5 times the debut. The year before, DreamWorks Animation’s Rise of the Guardians landed in late November with £1.97m. That one ended on £13m, which is 6.6 times the opening. In November 2011, Aardman’s Arthur Christmas began with £2.11m, eventually reaching £21.4m, a multiple of 10.1.
Disney points to an unexceptionally uncompetitive year for family films this Christmas, which it hopes will help The Good Dinosaur achieve – appropriately enough – a long tail. But the company’s own Star Wars: The Force Awakens should scoop up plenty of younger children, and then Fox’s The Peanuts Movie lands on December 21, so it remains to be seen how strongly The Good Dinosaur will sustain. Currently, the weakest-grossing Pixar film in the UK is Cars 2, with £15.71m.
If The Good Dinosaur does not achieve the big multiple of its opening number that Disney hopes for and expects, it would suffer the surprising humiliation of being beaten by Sony’s little-heralded Hotel Transylvania 2, which has been steadily accumulating box-office and now stands at £19.44m. Sony is hardly considered a powerhouse in the animation game, but now has a couple of steady franchises with Hotel Transylvania and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.
Hunger Games holds the top spot
Thanks to The Good Dinosaur’s slow start, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 easily holds on to the top spot. Box-office fell 51% from the opening frame, which compares very equivalently with a drop of 52% for Mockingjay – Part 1 in its second session. After 11 days, Part 2 has reached £19.32m, as against £21.25m for Part 1 at the same stage of its run. Based on performance so far, Part 2 looks headed for a total of £28-29m in the UK.
Meanwhile, falling another 44% at the weekend, Spectre stands at £88.4m after 35 days, which compares with £91.5m for Skyfall at the same stage of its run.
The live event
Yet another London stage play has opened in cinemas with box-office over £1m. The latest live hit is The Winter’s Tale, a product of a year-long, five-play residency by the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company at the Garrick theatre. The Winter’s Tale, starring Branagh and Judi Dench, was broadcast live to cinemas worldwide on Thursday, grossing £1.06m in the UK and Ireland. A handful of encores at the weekend pushed the tally to £1.08m. Two bigger encores are to follow on 7 and 24 December.
Hamlet at the Barbican, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, had grossed £1.87m in UK cinemas by the end of its first weekend, and has now reached £2.85m. The Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company will offer Romeo and Juliet and The Entertainer to cinemas next year.
The future
Overall, UK box-office is down 22% on the previous frame, which benefited from the opening of the Hunger Games finale, and is also 4% down on the equivalent session from 2014, when Paddington landed at the top spot. Cinema owners are now gearing up for a couple of relatively soft sessions, since Star Wars: The Force Awakens arrives on 17 December and it’s had an inevitable ripple effect on the release calendar. Top new release this week is likely to be Victor Frankenstein, starring James McAvoy and Daniel Radcliffe. Three festive-themed titles of varying genre hues – Christmas with the Coopers, The Night Before and Krampus – go head to head. In the arthouse space, Agyness Deyn stars in Terence Davies’s Sunset Song. Next Tuesday, NT Live offers a live beaming of a one-off staging of Jane Eyre from the National Theatre.
Top 10 films November 27-29
1. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2, £4,534,464 from 579 sites. Total: £19,323,711
2. The Good Dinosaur, £2,926,448 from 520 sites (new)
3. Spectre, £2,179,154 from 536 sites. Total: £88,374,402
4. Bridge of Spies, £1,682,392 from 531 sites (new)
5. Black Mass, £1,272,249 from 441 sites (new)
6. The Lady in the Van, £950,961 from 548 sites. Total: £9,047,439
7. Carol, £540,632 from 206 sites (new)
8. Tamasha, £254,750 from 80 sites (new)
9. Brooklyn, £200,778 from 213 sites. Total: £4,349,414
10. Hotel Transylvania 2, £197,161 from 449 sites. Total: £19,439,987
Other openers
Mukhtiar Chadha, £28,297 from 16 sites
Branagh Theatre Live, £19,828 from 13 sites (+ £1,056,063 on Nov 26)
Doctor Zhivago, £16,344 from 8 sites (rerelease)
Inji Iduppazhagi, £11,120 from 4 sites
Radiator, £5,644 from 5 sites
Out 1, £4,125 from 1 site (rerelease)
The Mikado – English National Opera, £1,593 from 1 site
All About Them, £916 (+ £1,623 previews) from 2 sites
Being AP, £547 from 1 site (+ £49,320 from 73 sites on Nov 23)
Unbranded, £181 from 1 site
My Skinny Sister, £128 from 1 site
