The winner
Falling a decent 36%, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel comfortably held on to the top spot for a second week, rebuffing the challenge of new releases such as Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie. After 11 days, the ensemble comedy has grossed a healthy £8.64m.
So far, Second Best Exotic is performing rather differently in the marketplace to its predecessor, although no less successfully. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel began in late February 2012 with a £2.22m opening weekend, increasing 5% in its second frame to £2.34m. At that stage of its run, after two weekends of play, it stood at £7.01m.
With the sequel, it’s been a different story. Second Best Exotic began with a stonking £3.07m (plus previews of £705,000), dropping to £1.96m for the second session. It’s now reasonable to assume that this second film won’t match the extraordinary sustained performance of the first one, which managed a final total that was 9.2 times its opening number (ie £20.4m). If Second Best Exotic manages to quintuple its debut tally, it will get to £15m, which would still be a strong and very profitable result for Fox UK, with foreign all to come.
Like its predecessor, Second Best Exotic is performing well on weekdays, grossing a solid £2.91m during the Monday-to-Thursday period last week. The film should go into this weekend with £10.5m already grossed at UK cinemas.
The indie hit
Although Second Best Exotic managed a healthy site average of £3,240, it was no match for Still Alice, which achieved the best per-cinema number of any film on release: £4,454. The US indie drama grossed a very strong £383,000 from 86 venues, plus £18,500 in previews.
The success of Still Alice is a vindication of distributor Curzon’s strategy, which was to wait for all of the major awards contenders to play out to UK audiences, holding back release until after the Oscars ceremony. In doing so, it gambled that Julianne Moore would, as expected, win the best actress prize. In order to make the film eligible for the Baftas (another win for Moore), Curzon quietly released the film for one week in December at Curzon Ripon in North Yorkshire.
Despite Moore’s clean sweep of all the major actress prizes, it was by no means certain that audiences would show up for Still Alice. Adulatory reviews made the film sound not so cheery, given the early-onset Alzheimer’s storyline. But the timing was perfect, with no other film offering direct competition, and intense audience curiosity for a film that had been included in all the awards conversations, but which had been almost impossible to see. Still Alice had been leaked online after Sony’s server was hacked in November, but most pirate sites were swiftly shut down, and, in any case, the target audience for Still Alice hardly overlaps with regular viewers of pirated material.
Curzon received investment from the BFI’s distribution fund in order to help the film break out to a broader audience. This it now looks set to do: Still Alice expands to 200 cinemas from this Friday.
The mainstream new releases
Two Hollywood studio pictures benefited from significantly wider release than Still Alice – Chappie and Unfinished Business both landed at 400-plus venues – while Universal’s Kill the Messenger landed at 115. All proved disappointing relative to expectations.
Sony’s Chappie at least managed to break the £1m barrier, with takings of £1.02m from 459 cinemas. This compares with a debut of £2.15m plus £974,000 in previews for Blomkamp’s previous film Elysium. District 9, which benefited from excellent buzz but lacked familiar cast names, began with £2.29m in September 2009.
Fox comedy Unfinished Business landed flatly in ninth place, with £394,000 from 408 cinemas, yielding a £966 average. Vince Vaughn’s previous vehicle, Delivery Man, did much better, beginning with £1.10m from 372 venues in January 2014. Despite the seeming enduring affection for Vaughn, it was always hard to identify the audience for a fish-out-of-water, Euro-business-trip comedy, co-starring Dave Franco and Tom Wilkinson.
The flop
Kill the Messenger, starring Jeremy Renner, did worst of all, with a gross of just £58,000, and a site average of £501. Produced by Universal’s boutique arm Focus in the US, this film needed a more nurturing release strategy than it has been afforded. Despite some notable advocates among US critics (Variety and Hollywood Reporter were both positive), the film wasn’t aggressively screened to UK reviewers, and cinema-goers could be forgiven for not noticing it had come out. Perhaps Kill the Messenger’s fate was sealed when it grossed just $2.5m in US cinemas last October.
Fifty Shades update
With £32.71m so far, Fifty Shades of Grey is now the fifth-biggest hit of the past year, behind the final Hobbit film, Paddington, The Inbetweeners 2 and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Fifty Shades should have no trouble overtaking the latter two, although it will struggle to catch Paddington, now at £37.24m. Incidentally, Paddington saw a 64% rise in box office at the weekend, suggesting that the bear has no intention of going away, and will still be in cinemas for the Easter holiday, despite a DVD release on 23 March.
The market falters
Previously this year, successive weekends have proved level with the equivalent frame from 2014, or well ahead, or only very moderately down. Now, for the first time this year, there is a significant shortfall, with takings 21% down on the same session a year ago, when 300: Rise of an Empire knocked The Lego Movie off the top spot. It’s easy to identify the reason: the lack of any commercially compelling new film arriving in multiplexes. Sony’s nervousness about Chappie can be gauged by the fact that reviews were embargoed until two days before release, and the first UK screening for critics was held on the day the embargo lifted. It’s hard to escape the feeling that this year distributors viewed the first weekend of March as a quiet harbour for some of their less favoured vessels – with the honourable exception of Still Alice, which benefited all the more in comparison to the rival offer.
The future
Multiplexes are clamouring for a blockbuster event, and that may well occur on March 20, with the arrival of Divergent sequel, Insurgent. Meanwhile, Mother’s day weekend welcomes Suite Française, the romantic second world war drama starring Michelle Williams, Matthias Schoenaerts and Kristin Scott Thomas. Less obvious mum-bait is Liam Neeson action thriller Run All Night. DreamWorks Animation’s extraterrestrial comedy Home, which releases officially on 20 March, plays previews this weekend, ingeniously targeting the family audience with the tagline “Where the heart is this Mother’s Day – see it first Mother’s Day weekend.” Alternatives include X+Y, starring Asa Butterfield as a maths genius dealing with autism, which also sneaks in a sweet thirtysomething romance featuring Sally Hawkins and Rafe Spall.
Top 10 films, 6-8 March
1. The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, £1,957,256 from 604 sites. Total: £8,640,646
2. Focus, £1,312,963 from 466 sites. Total: £4,253,274
3. Fifty Shades of Grey, £1,066,813 from 481 sites. Total: £32,706,648
4. Chappie, £1,015,058 from 459 sites (new)
5. Big Hero 6, £818,737 from 533 sites. Total: £18,626,512
6. Shaun the Sheep the Movie, £611,005 from 557 sites. Total: £12,388,932
7. Kingsman: The Secret Service, £450,947 from 314 sites. Total: £15,305,859
8. Still Alice, £401,565 from 86 sites (new)
9. Unfinished Business, £394,177 from 408 sites (new)
10. It Follows, £229,927 from 254 sites. Total: £819,105
Other openers
Romeo & Juliet – Bolshoi Ballet, £303,956 from 229 sites
Kill the Messsenger, £57,666 from 115 sites
Appropriate Behaviour, £22,054 from 17 sites
Hyena, £19,564 from 17 sites
Enakkul Oruvan, £10,360 from 11 sites
White Bird in a Blizzard, £7,898 from 4 sites
Berlin Philharmoniker – Bernard Haitink, £6,336 from 10 sites
Dreamcatcher, £3,710 from 3 sites
Difret, £3,041 from 11 sites
Life of Riley, £2,749 from 1 site
Bafta Shorts 2015, £2,275 from 4 sites
High Tide, £575 from 4 sites
• Thanks to Rentrak
