The winner
Most kids don’t break up for the Easter holiday until this Friday, yet DreamWorks Animation and distribution partner Fox have already grossed a tidy sum from Home, a road-trip comedy featuring a teenage girl (voiced by Rihanna) and a cute alien (Jim Parsons). It took £3.41m at the weekend; previews from the previous Saturday and Sunday bring takings to a robust £6.26m.
This is the biggest opening for an animated film since The Lego Movie kicked off with £8.05m, including previews of £2.16m, in February 2014. DreamWorks Animation’s Penguins of Madagascar, began with £1.58m in December. A suitable comparison for Home is The Croods, which debuted with £5.37m including previews of £1.85m in March 2013. The Croods went on to rake in £26.9m.
The runner-up
In the US, Insurgent is very slightly down on the opening of its predecessor Divergent. In the UK, and in many international territories, it’s a different story. Divergent debuted in April 2014 with £1.76m; Insurgent is 44% ahead of that, with an opening of £2.55m, plus previews of £385,000. Divergent maxed out at £6.7m in the UK. With £2.94m already achieved, and the holiday to come, Insurgent looks likely to sail past that figure.
The results are not surprising. The second films in the Hunger Games and Twilight series saw big increases on their predecessors in the UK, as more people caught on to the books in the intervening periods. It probably helped that many of Insurgent’s young cast members – notably Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort in The Fault in Our Stars and Miles Teller in Whiplash – saw their profiles rise after Divergent.
A pair of action flops
If Sean Penn has been looking with envy at the late-flourishing action career of Liam Neeson, then his attempt to emulate it has fallen at the first hurdle. The Gunman, from Taken director Pierre Morel, debuted with £406,000 from 400 cinemas, yielding a weak average of £1,015. In comparison, Taken kicked off with nearly triple that amount – £1.17m – despite average tickets prices being 23% lower in 2008.
But The Gunman’s performance looks positively kickass compared with that of Jason Statham’s latest actioner, Wild Card, which began with a dismal £152,000 from 229 cinemas, and a £664 average. It’s fair to say that distributor Lionsgate didn’t push Wild Card as aggressively as might have been the case. Increasingly, Statham is looking less than a safe bet, except when he’s in franchises bolstered by significant co-star talent (The Expendables, Fast & Furious). Statham’s previous film outside these hit series was Homefront (co-starring James Franco), which debuted with a weak £440,000 from 295 cinemas in December 2013. Before that, he had Hummingbird, which limped out of the gate with £207,000 from 262 venues.
The arthouse alternatives
Since the beginning of the year, when the awards season began in earnest, significant foreign language films have been in short supply. Who would release a promising foreign language title, only to see it crushed by The Theory of Everything, Birdman and Whiplash? Now, as the awards titles release their hold on independent cinemas, welcome alternatives are beginning to emerge. The excellent Argentine picture Wild Tales, which arrives this week, has already clocked up decent numbers in previews; and Mommy, the fifth feature from prolific French-Canadian enfant terrible Xavier Dolan, debuted last weekend with a decent £36,000 from 24 sites. Preview takings pushed the overall tally to just below £60,000.
For context, Dolan’s previous biggest UK hit, Heartbeats, managed £30,500 over the course of its lifetime. Mommy has nearly doubled that number already. Mommy premiered at Cannes last year, sharing the jury prize with Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language. Mommy enjoys a very high IMDb user rating of 8.3/10. But Still Alice remains the top attraction for independent cinema fans, and has now reached a robust £1.70m after 17 days.
The Voices, from Persepolis director Marjane Satrapi, and starring Ryan Reynolds, Gemma Arterton and Anna Kendrick, enjoys a rather uncertain positioning between mainstream and arthouse. Box-office is a lukewarm £118,000 from 117 cinemas, yielding a £1,011 average.
The future
The official box-office chart shows takings a healthy 89% up on the previous weekend, and 78% up on last year, when a weak field of new releases saw The Grand Budapest Hotel rise to the top of the chart in its third week. These percentages are skewed by the addition of Home’s previews in the current session’s figures, but, even so, the market is healthily up on a year ago.
The news for cinemas continues to improve with the arrival on 27 March of Cinderella – already a significant hit in other territories. It’s joined by The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, which played previews at the weekend (not mentioned in the official chart below). Also in the mix: comedy Get Hard, starring Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart; long-delayed fantasy actioner The Seventh Son; indie sci-fi The Signal; and British sci-fi family film Robot Overlords. Among the choices for arthouse cinemas are the aforementioned Wild Tales, fashion documentary Dior & I and Michael Winterbottom’s The Face of an Angel.
UK 10 films, 20-22 March
1. Home, £6,025,917 from 531 sites (new)
2. The Divergent Series: Insurgent, £2,938,860 from 497 sites (new)
3. The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, £671,088 from 518 sites. Total: £13,413,705
4. Focus, £490,317 from 364 sites. Total: £6,527,072
5. The Gunman, £405,934 from 400 sites (new)
6. Run All Night, £348,638 from 429 sites. Total: £1,680,666
7. Suite Française, £268,607 from 446 sites. Total: £1,293,408
8. Still Alice, £257,016 from 234 sites. Total: £1,698,527
9. Fifty Shades of Grey, £235,681 from 332 sites. Total: £34,395,106
10. Wild Card, £152,034 from 229 sites (new)
Other openers
The Voices, 117 sites, £118,255
The Tale of Princess Kaguya, 44 sites, £69,344
Mommy, 24 sites, £35,957 (+ £23,978 previews)
Jalaibee, 23 sites, £21,717
A Second Chance, 18 sites, £5,031
Showboat – San Francisco Opera, 6 sites, £2,674
Son Mektup, 2 sites, £1,858
Mandira Filozofu Istanbul, 1 site, £429
Nobody Told Us Anything, 1 site, £134
Dark Summer, 1 site, £32
Residue, 1 site, £15
• Thanks to Rentrak
