Duffel power
Paddington’s roll-out, with just Netherlands (11 February), Portugal (5 March), China (March) and Japan (2016) left, is almost up, but StudioCanal’s bright-eyed, intelligent update of the Michael Bond favourite can be counted a financial success. And then some: it’s the highest grossing non-Hollywood family film ever, if you discount Spirited Away - which earned most of its take in Japan. Having passed $200m since the weekend, it has kept Penguins of Madagascar ($333.9m) and the third Night at the Museum ($314.5m) – the other kids’ fare currently doing the rounds, both of which presumably had far more in the way of studio marketing muscle – in sight.
On top of a predictably formidable UK take ($53.5m and counting – putting it No 2 on our 2014 list), it’s done brisk business in France ($19.7m), Germany ($13m), Australia ($8.7m), Italy ($5.4m) and Russia ($4.6m – now holding at No 1 for the second week running), with encouraging results in less obviously marmalade-saturated locales like Turkey ($947K) and the UAE ($999K). In all of those territories except Australia it’s ahead of Alvin and the Chipmunks, which is third on the table of highest-grossing live-action/CGI hybrids. Indeed, our duffel-coated visitor has taken more than that film on his oversea travels – $148.5m to $144m. That is still a way short of The Smurfs’ $421.1m figure – the No 1 film in the hybrid bracket – but Paddington has easily cleared the profit hurdle for StudioCanal, whose $55m outlay on the film was the biggest in their history.
The winner
It may have added the Superbowl-weekend record to the trophy cabinet, but a 50.7% US drop from last week for American Sniper signals a slowdown, finally, in its prodigious domestic box-office run. Clint Eastwood’s film has clocked up $247.7m (£163m) in the US now, making it the sixth most successful film of 2014; it will likely wind up third, behind Guardians of the Galaxy and the latest Hunger Games. The overseas total stands at $67.3m, with more than half of its release footprint still to come. With $150m abroad – which could put its overall take in the vicinity of an improbable-sounding $500m – that seems like a sound bet. There’s no doubt from the spate of career-best openings for the director around the world that the discussion and controversy swirling around the film, as well as its superlative US showing, have fanned its prospects. But, as one commenter on this blog was at pains to point out, could it also be because Eastwood has successfully addressed deeper universal themes of soldiery and wartime trauma? Middle Eastern figures – not currently readily available – might give some clue about whether the film is transcending its US point of view, and speaking even to the people in the crosshairs. American Sniper is currently playing in the UAE, Oman, Qatar, Lebanon, Israel and select Iraqi cinemas; don’t take it as representative of the overall Middle Eastern response, but the film has been pulled from Baghdad’s only theatre.
Breaking the reality-TV taboo
There have been plenty of films about reality TV, many influenced by it, but very few drawn directly from it – perhaps that would be stepping too firmly across aesthetic lines between cinema and television. The Chinese film industry, however, seems like it is ready to broker a marriage: a feature-length instalment of Running Man, based on a reality TV show that aired its first episode just last October, has debuted at $37.1m there, at No 2 behind The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. Roping in competing celebrity teams that feature a surprising amount of young Chinese A-listers (Wang Baoqiang, Lost in Thailand; Li Chen, Aftershock; Angelababy, Young Detective Dee), the film version shoves them out into the jungle for various challenges. (Sound familiar?) A $30m+ opening is noteworthy; the only reference point is Where Are We Going, Dad?, also based on a South Korean TV format and released on the corresponding January weekend last year. Focusing on the relationship between celebrity dads and their offspring, it opened to $40.6m, and took an eventual $111.9m, making it the country’s 19th most successful film. It appears that Dad (which has a sequel due on 19 February) was no cinematic masterwork, and there’s no English-language review of Running Man yet. But synergy, not quality, seems to be the point: major stars moonlighting in TV to tap China’s burgeoning celebrity culture, and then gilding the original format on the big screen.
View to a killing
Kingsman: The Secret Service holds itself a cut above the usual spy spoof: more streetwise, more knowing, more cynically ultraviolent. Trouble is that the pleasures of genre deconstruction can be difficult to market in two-minute bursts to mainstream punters, especially on a worldwide scale. The similarly cocky Kick-Ass – director Matthew Vaughn’s first collaboration in 2010 with screenwriter Jane Goldman on Mark Millar material – arguably underperformed, failing to crack the global $100m mark. Kingsman, though, has started well: a $6.7m opening in England and $529K in Sweden (the latter reportedly getting an early release on the strength of the film’s outre gag about its princess), are both ahead of Kick-Ass. Thirteenth on the global chart, it’s got a long roll-out to come; if the marketing has hooked fanboys and hipsters, then perhaps its Bondian heritage – a shade more focused than Kick-Ass’s generic superhero takedown – gives it a better chance of pulling in general audiences. In terms of comedic spy films, it might struggle to match True Lies ($378.8 worldwide), or the Austin Powers sequels ($312m and $296.6m), lacking the same kind of star or franchise power. More realistic comparison points are the first, and in 1997 less familiar, Austin Powers ($99.7m, inflation-corrected) or 2003’s Johnny English ($160m) – but Kingsman isn’t exactly on their tonal wavelength. If Fox are thinking aspirationally, then perhaps the benchmark for savvy genre deconstruction that crossed over to the mainstream is 1996’s Scream: $261m global total, inflation-corrected.
The rest of the world
Apart from Running Man, there is only one outsider to trouble Hollywood on the global chart this week: Chinese animation Boonie Bears: Mystical Winter, based on a popular TV show, which brought in $14.5m for fourth place in that territory and sixth globally. Probably not the new Frozen, though.
The future
Warner Brothers’ space opera Jupiter Ascending, delayed since last July, emerges at last from the wormhole this weekend in most territories, apart from China, Japan and Australia. And carrying a fair amount of baggage, not least a woolly justification for the long holdup that only piles further pressure on directors Andy and Lana Wachowski: 12 years after the Matrix sequels and on the back of a disappointing $130.5m for Cloud Atlas, they are in danger of having the “interesting failure” sign hung permanently around their necks.
Sony’s kimchi-filled hot potato The Interview, snatching $596k in limited release in France, Brazil and the Netherlands this week, sticks its head above the parapet in the UK, Germany and Norway; there’s still something distinctly tentative about the studio’s piecemeal release pattern for the Seth Rogen/James Franco comedy. Bollywood elder Amitabh Bachchan heads out to India and the diaspora in his latest, self-punning film, Shamitabh, in which he helps a deaf-dumb man become a star by dubbing his voice parts. And Aardman Animations’ televisual cash-ewe Shaun the Sheep assumes movie-sized proportions, opening first in the UK and Norway, before an extensive global rollout that continues into the autumn. The Bristolian outfit’s current worldwide PB is $224.8m for 2000’s Chicken Run – and if there’s one thing almost as universal as chickens, it’s sheep. Box office-wise, that’s what I call woolly justification.
Top 10 global box office, 30 January-1 February
1. American Sniper, $41.8m from 31 countries. $315m cumulative – 21.4% international; 78.6% US
2. (New) Running Man, $37.3m from 2 countries – 99.9% int; 0.1% US
3. Taken 3, $24.9m from 62 countries. $245.9m cum – 66.9% int; 33.1% US
4. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, $23.7m from 58 countries. $915.9m cum – 72.5% int; 27.5% US
5. Big Hero 6, $20.6m from 38 countries. $484.7m cum – 55% int; 45% US
6. (New) Boonie Bears: Mystical Winter, $14.5m from 1 country – 100% int
7. Paddington, $11m from 26 countries. $198.5m cum – 74.5% int; 25.5% US
8. The Imitation Game, $10.7m from 21 countries. $133m cum – 48.8% int; 51.2% US
9. (New) Project Almanac, $10.4m from 11 countries – 18.3% int; 81.7% US
10. The Theory of Everything, $8.5m from 27 countries. $81.8m – 62.6% int; 37.4% US
• Thanks to Rentrak. Some of this week’s figures are based on estimates; all historical figures unadjusted, unless otherwise stated.
• This article was amended on 4 February 2015. The original stated Paddington was the most successful non-Hollywood children’s film. This has been corrected.
