RankTitleDomestic Gross (Weekend)Worldwide Gross (Cume)Week #Percentage ChangeBudget1The Secret Life of Pets 2$47,110,000$97,035,0001N/A$80M2Dark Phoenix$33,000,000$140,000,0001N/A$200M3Aladdin (2019)$24,500,000$604,885,9263-42.8%$183M4Godzilla: King of the Monsters$15,540,000$292,297,0972-67.5%$170M5Rocketman$14,000,000$101,798,7562-45.6%$40MNotable Box Office StoriesThe Secret Life of Pets 2 - For how massive the 2019 blockbuster season began with Avengers: Endgame it's been a rather muted start with notable disappointments from once very successful franchises. This week saw two of those, first with The Secret Life of Pets 2 which opened at #1 to a disappointing $47.1M. The original is a film people probably forgot was an absolute monster hit as the first one opened to a massive $100M+ and closed over $350M domestic, so a second film seemed like a surefire thing. Even with the replacement of the lead voice actor Louis C.K. after the comedian faced major sexual misconduct allegations, the film arrived mostly drama free and at the same time slot just three years later. So why then did this open to almost half the original? Well for one the trailers and the marketing for Secret Life of Pets were rock solid, doing the classic Illumination thing of putting the easiest and best gags in the trailer and making it perfect YouTube entertainment fodder for kids. But the actual film was not a light series of gags, but rather a somewhat violent adventure film with the most cliche plot around. Not exactly something that drives parents and kids to have to see a second one.The Secret Life of Pets 2 (cont.) - The second one just has not had the same level of hype at all, feeling more like a perfunctory well we had to make a second one so eat it up! But more urgently is there's a wee bit of a behemoth franchise coming out in two weeks, the child friendly franchise Child's Play. Come on, the family friendliness is even in the title! Oh yeah and Toy Story 4 is coming out and almost certainly will pass $100M domestic in opening and that number could potentially go as high as $200M. That's a lot of families who are probably convincing their kids a 2,000th watch of Secret Life of Pets on DVD is good enough and saving the $50+ trip to the movies for the big event. But doesn't that make Disney's take over of blockbuster culture more inevitable and sad? What are the three blockbusters of the summer that so far have been unqualified successes? Endgame, Aladdin and soon Toy Story 4. Meanwhile major franchise fair from other studios has found very little purchase this season. Look not saying I'm pitying the Minions folks for not making more money, and with such a low for animation budget this will do just fine in the end. Still it is telling that despite how much you may hate Disney live action reboots, MCU films, or Pixar sequels, goddamn it so far they are the only ones that are just pure successes this summer...oh and also John Wick 3.Dark Phoenix - Well as much as it pains me as a fan of the franchise to say this, is there any more fitting way for such a wild, long running, unwieldy, tonally inconsistent, quality inconsistent, and bizarrely structured series to end than this? A collective giving up on the franchise with a film that is so ashamed of the franchise title it doesn't even carry the X-Men moniker in the official US release. Yes "Dark Phoenix" (called X-Men: Dark Phoenix in every non-coward country) closed opened this week to a truly awful $33M at #2. That's the worst opening for the X-Men franchise, dropping below previous 'winner' The Wolverine at $53.1M. Now yes the film is not the final Fox film with X-Men characters but not only is New Mutants its own beast not related to the 'timeline' (if you can call that total mess of a continuity that) but it's not coming out until checks calendar 2037 so this really feels like the end of an era. And god what a colossal disinterest in the franchise in such a short time. X-Men: Days of Future Past was released just 5 years ago and seemed to be putting the X-Men back on track with a fantastic $90M opening. But now we get to here, the second adaptation of the Dark Phoenix comic book arc, written by the same writer of the first attempt, with even worse reviews and a pitiful opening that's almost 1/3 the opening of Days of Future Past.Dark Phoenix (cont.) - I don't think it's that hard to see how we got here. Future Past was a fluke in the midst of the beginning of the total dominance of the MCU on superhero franchise making and its wildly carefree tone to the cinematic universe style was quickly out of fashion. DOFP got away from it by being a multi-generational time traveling epic but once we went back to deal with Apocalypse and whatever the audience was already losing interest. Trying again just 12 years later to do Dark Phoenix felt cheap and wanting and the whole cast feels like they could be anywhere else. It just doesn't have the verve anymore and you can feel the audience feeling it. Even worse the film is stupidly expensive, a massive $200M because the entire final fight scene had to be scrapped after terrible audience test reactions which ballooned the budget considerably. At least they didn't have to pay J Law insane money to come back for those reshoots. So yeah this is a disaster, one that Kevin Feige will happily drag the corpse to Bob Iger's office and say "yeah we can all agree this can be totally rebooted from scratch right?"Dark Phoenix (cont.) - But honestly I will miss this weird ass franchise. In being so scattershot and strange you got weird films that you don't feel would be made elsewhere. How insane the two highest grossing films in the franchise are R-rated mid budget comedies. And what about Logan or the long delayed New Mutants, unique genre exercises you are just not getting from the MCU. But then on the business side it's hard to argue. The X-Men films have always had incredible casts yet in 19 years and 12 movies they couldn't top the worldwide gross of the 4 Avengers movies released in just 7 years. X-Men paved the way for the superhero films of today but like innovators in so many fields it just never found the right balance and thus ends not with a bang, but with a whimper and being sold to the company that came along after them and did it better. Farewell OG X-Men series, you wild weird ride that ended with me puking on the tracks. Or something, you write your own metaphors.Films Reddit Wants to FollowThis is a segment where we keep a weekly tally of currently showing films that aren't in the Top 5 that fellow redditors want updates on. If you'd like me to add a film to this chart, make a comment in this thread.TitleDomestic Gross (Weekly)Domestic Gross (Cume)Worldwide Gross (Cume)BudgetWeek #Captain Marvel$262,532$426,429,965$1,127,779,250$152M14Us$114,150$175,005,930$254,553,842$20M12Avengers: Endgame$11,877,156$824,365,940$2,730,565,940$356M7Pokémon Detective Pikachu$10,485,508$137,401,719$409,501,719$150M5John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum$16,610,186$138,662,998$252,262,998$554Notable Film ClosingsN/AAs always r/boxoffice is a great place to share links and other conversations about box office news.Also you can see the archive of all Box Office Week posts at r/moviesboxoffice (which have recently been updated).My Letterboxd: http://bit.ly/2rSmMyn via /r/movies http://bit.ly/2wHDByg
No comments:
Post a Comment