Chris
Nolan’s Interstellar topped the Friday box office with a $17
million, giving it $19.15 million since Tuesday night. Disney’s
animated Big Hero 6 earned a terrific $15.83 million and will
probably top the charts for the weekend.
As
expected, it was a pretty big Friday for both new releases. Chris Nolan’s Interstellar had
a somewhat odd unique schedule, going out in 249 film-only theaters and racking
up around $2.15 million prior to its national roll-out on Thursday at 8:00pm,
where it grabbed another $2.7m from pre-release previews. So when I tell you
that the film earned $17m on “Friday,” I’m including the $2.7m in Thursday
sneaks (per usual) but not including the $2.15m in early previews over its
first 48 hours. So for the moment, the Matthew McConaughey/Anne
Hathaway/Jessica Chastain/Michael Caine outer-space adventure has earned
$19.15m at the end of its first regular day of business. This is all worth
clarifying because it basically establishes that the film is playing a little
closer to Inception than
one might initially realize.
That Leonardo
DiCaprio-starring “live an action movie in your dreams” adventure opened in
mid-July of 2010 with $3m in midnight sneaks and a full $21.7m opening
Friday. Inception ended
up with an opening weekend of $62.7m, or a 2.88 weekend multiplier. If Interstellar performs
the same, with a “$19.15m Friday,” it gets to $55.1m for the weekend. If we use
the $17m Friday number, it gets to $51m. And if it continues to perform
like Skyfall (which
had $2.2m in IMAX sneaks around this time two years ago that counted towards
the opening weekend), it gets to $54m by Sunday night. All of these
numbers are in line with reasonable expectations, and frankly I’m a little
surprised how accurate my Skyfall comparisons
turned out to be as I was in uncharted territory with the whole “48 hours early
on 249 film-only screens thing.” Paramount is projecting a $51m Fri-Sun and
$53m overall debut, so we’ll see tomorrow how this all plays out.
I
would argue that Interstellar,
which has somber, “why so serious?” sequences of scientific debate, family
trauma, and coldly analytic space exploration as opposed to shoot-outs, car
chases, and zero-gravity fisticuffs, isn’t as explicitly as commercial a film
as Inception.
And McConaissance or not, Matthew McConaughey isn’t the mega
movie star that Leonardo DiCaprio was in 2010 and still is
today. All of this is meant to highlight that it’s no tragedy if Interstellar‘s
debut weekend ends up well below Inception and
it’s quite an accomplishment and a testament to Nolan’s name among general
moviegoers if it ends up pretty close by tomorrow night. The film earned
$4.6 million in IMAX alone, along with $1.9m in other premium-large-format
screens. The $165 million production played 52% male and 75% over 25 years old.
The
reviews were good without being overtly spectacular, and I frankly don’t see
the kind of nutso 3.2x multiplier that greeted Gravity. Even if the picture
ends up on the lower end of weekend guestimates, we’re still looking at one of
the bigger opening weekends for a live-action “not based on anything movie.”
Moreover, it will be only the fourth time that two films have both opened with
over $50m. Oddly enough, all three prior occasions (Monsters Inc. $82m/World War Z $66m, Madagascar 3 $60m/Prometheus $51m,
and Wall-E $63m/Wanted $50m) involved
an animated film and a live-action film with the animated entry topping the box
office. It almost happened this June, but 22 Jump Street opened to $58m
while How to
Train Your Dragon 2 only made $49m because the world is a
terrible place.
If Big Hero 6 ends
up taking the top spot over the weekend, which at this point is likely, it will
be the first time a Christopher Nolan picture has not debuted at #1
since Insomnia in
2002. Obviously that will mean that Nolan will be brought in front of a tribunal
Monday morning on the Paramount (Viacom Inc.) lot, which you can
only watch live if your HDTV can also project film. Of note, the film also
opened in most overseas markets courtesy of Warner Bros. (Time
Warner Inc.). At last count, the film had earned $8.7m on Thursday
from 35 international markets and opened with $17m in another 22 on Friday,
bringing its overseas cume to $26.6m and its worldwide cume to $45.7m.
What
will be fun to watch over the weekend is how well the film played in each of
the 4,718 formats in which it was offered (IMAX 70mm, 70mm film, 35mm film,
IMAX, 4k digital, and digital) as well as specifically how well it played
in IMAX as opposed to the other PLF formats which all stocked up on Interstellar this
weekend too. What will be less fun to watch is whether the widespread
complaints about the sound mix, which frankly drowned out much of the
dialogue in my screening, will be noticed by the masses and/or affect the
film’s reception? I figured it was just me during my press screening, but it
caused much annoyance in the critics’ circle.
The
other big release of the weekend was Walt Disney’s Big Hero 6. If
the film was somewhat drowned out in terms of film pundit-fueled publicity, it
didn’t matter much. The well-reviewed (and mostly delightful) Disney comic book
superhero adventure (loosely based on a Marvel comic) started its weekend with
$15.83 million, including $1.2m in Thursday previews. Since Walt
Disney animated features tend to open over long Thanksgiving weekends or
in mid-December after it’s been out in LA/NY for weeks and everyone’s talking
about Avatar which
just screened for press and blew everyone’s’ minds (cough-Princess and the Frog-cough),
the best comparison here is Wreck
It Ralph and A
Christmas Carol, which conveniently opened on the first weekend of
November in 2012 and 2009 respectively.
Wreck
It Ralph opened with $13.5m on its
way to a $49m debut weekend, which was the biggest Fri-Sun Disney animated
debut weekend until Frozen last
year (which made $67m of its $93m Thanksgiving debut over the Fri-Sun portion
of the weekend). So if it plays like Wreck
It Ralph, expect a $57m opening weekend. A Christmas Carol opened
with $8.8m on Friday towards a $30m debut weekend, which would give Big Hero 6 a
$53m debut weekend. That Big
Hero 6 opened noticeably better than Wreck It Ralph even
with a mega-ton monster like Interstellar on
its heels is impressive and again shows that there is room for more than
one big film in the marketplace as long as they aren’t chasing the same
demographics.
It
stands to reason that the kid-powered matinees, and the fact that Big Hero 6 is
an hour shorter than Interstellar,
will help the Disney toon take the top spot for the weekend. The only downside
over the long haul is that DreamWorks Animation’s The Penguins of
Madagascar is going to be more formidable Thanksgiving
competition than Rise
of the Guardians was two years ago. Nonetheless, once the hype
for Interstellar dies
down, hopefully pundits will get back to talking about the genuinely
engaging and also very pro-science adventure that Big Hero 6 is.
Between you and me, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Big Hero 6 hold
a little stronger than Interstellar,
especially if Dumb
and Dumber To plays too raunchy for the younger kids.
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