The winner: Logan
With a debut of £9.44m including previews of £2.50m, Logan has delivered the biggest UK opening for an X-Men movie. The third Wolverine film opened comfortably ahead of 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine (£6.66m, including £1.87m in previews) and 2013’s The Wolverine (£4.69m including £939,000 in previews).
Not counting the three Wolverine films, there have been six X-Men movies: the original trilogy (2000, 2003, 2006); the two films featuring a new cast (2011, 2016); and Days of Future Past (2014), which combined both sets of actors. Among that sextet, Days of Future Past was by far the most successful, with £27.1m in total. X-Men 2 (£20.7m) is the only other film in the whole franchise to crack £20m here. The Wolverine is the lowest commercial achiever, with a UK total of £13.8m.
Days of Future Past began in May 2014 with £9.14m, including previews of £1.59m. That means that, looking strictly at weekend takings, Logan falls short of the franchise champion’s debut. Still, Marvel and Fox can be happy that Logan is performing almost at the level of the only X-Men film to combine all of the mutant franchise’s most popular cast members.
Logan has delivered the second biggest debut of 2017, behind Sing (£10.49m). However, if previews are stripped out of the tallies, Logan earns top honours, with a £6.95m weekend, compared with £6.29m for Sing.
The alternative: Viceroy’s House
Released into 453 cinemas, Viceroy’s House, the first historical drama from Bend It Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha, opened with a decent £921,000, including previews of £12,000. Comparisons with past Chadha films are not particularly pertinent, but the number certainly represents a big recovery from her last effort, It’s a Wonderful Afterlife (total UK box office: £1.02m).
A more relevant comparison for Viceroy’s House might be A United Kingdom – they both feature colonial subject matter and a similar postwar setting. Amma Asante’s film kicked off last November with a weaker £619,000 from 420 venues, including £54,000 in previews.
The underperformer: Fist Fight
Limping into the bottom of the Top 10 is US comedy Fist Fight, starring Charlie Day and Ice Cube as teachers. Day’s previous hits have relied on substantial co-stars, notably with the Horrible Bosses franchise. Similarly, Cube has scored best in comedies where he was either a supporting player (the Jump Street films) or playing opposite popular comic actor Kevin Hart (Ride Along and its sequel).
Fist Fight has opened with a lacklustre £400,000 from 393 cinemas, delivering a site average of £1,018, the lowest of any film in the Top 10. It’s yet another comedy featuring adults behaving in an immature fashion – a genre that recently yielded Bad Moms and Office Christmas Party as well as almost the entire oeuvre of Seth Rogen.
The awards movie battle
Moving up from 12th place last week to fifth, Moonlight is now the highest placed film in the chart among the nine best picture Oscar nominees. Barry Jenkins’ winner grossed £731,000 from 343 cinemas, a rise of 86% on the previous session. Despite a big expansion of cinemas, the per-theatre average declined by just 5%. Total so far is £2.49m.
Moonlight’s surge saw it rise above Hidden Figures (£658,000) and Lion (£529,000) in the Top 10. Despite winning more Oscars than any other film, La La Land drops out of the Top 10 for the first time since release eight weeks ago. Of course, thanks to cumulative box office of £29.9m, it’s far ahead of all the other best picture nominees. Second is Lion, with £10.2m.
Lion has now delivered seven consecutive weekends with takings above £500,000 – a feat that eluded La La Land and all the other best picture nominees. Last year, only a few giant blockbusters managed it – Rogue One, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, The Jungle Book, Finding Dory and Bridget Jones’s Baby, for example. Lion opened with an unspectacular £1.26m but has now achieved an impressive eight times that amount.
The future
Thanks to the arrival of Logan, takings soared 34% above the previous session and an impressive 71% above the equivalent weekend from 2016, when London Has Fallen and Hail, Caesar! arrived in the top two spots. The market should remain buoyant this week, with the arrival on Thursday of Kong: Skull Island, starring Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson and Samuel L Jackson. The other releases – including Joan Collins and Pauline Collins in the Britcom The Time of Their Lives – are likely to be commercially modest. A key arthouse title is rape-revenge drama Elle, the unlikely pairing of Isabelle Huppert and director Paul Verhoeven that has won huge acclaim and earned Huppert an Oscar nomination. Rivals at the arthouse include documentary Dancer, about Ukrainian ballet star Sergei Polunin. It has already grossed £185,000 from a preview event last week.
Top 10 films, 2-5 March
1. Logan, £9,443,363 from 602 sites (new)
2. The Lego Batman Movie, £1,526,823 from 599 sites. Total: £24,954,821 (four weeks)
3. Viceroy’s House, £921,309 from 453 sites (new)
4. Sing, £799,947 from 556 sites. Total: £27,486,464 (six weeks)
5. Moonlight, £731,380 from 343 sites. Total: £2,487,119 (three weeks)
6. Fifty Shades Darker, £709,840 from 449 sites. Total: £21,935,589 (four weeks)
7. Hidden Figures, £657,709 from 430 sites. Total: £4,567,879 (three weeks)
8. Lion, £529,427 from 377 sites. Total: £10,223,207 (seven weeks)
9. John Wick: Chapter 2, £437,704 from 379 sites. Total: £5,370,534 (three weeks)
10. Fist Fight, £400,112 from 393 sites (new)
Other openers
Don’t Take Me Home, £67,473 (including £40,455 previews) from 21 sites
Certain Women, £50,953 from 25 sites
Trespass Against Us, £32,569 from 85 sites
Ezra, £10,970 from 62 sites
Jeena Isi Ka Naam Hai, £3,362 from nine sites
The Nights of Zayandeh-Rood, £2,876 from two sites
The Student, £1,548 from three sites
Reis, £1,193 from three sites
Kittu Unnadu Jagratha, £1,081 from 18 sites
MSG – Lion Heart 2, £1,069 from two sites
Headshot, £866 from four sites
Chosen, £206 from four sites
• Thanks to comScore. All figures relate to takings in UK and Ireland cinemas.
