The winner
It’s no evolutionary leap creatively, but it certainly looks like one box office-wise. Jurassic World, the fourth film in the Universal Studios series, has lived up to its name and delivered the first $500m+ global opening: $524.1m to be precise and No 1 in every single territory it graced. Both its $208.8m US debut and its $315.3m overseas set new records (previously held by The Avengers, $207.4m; and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, $314m respectively), which combined to set a new global benchmark (see table below). The US debut stacks up emphatically against the original film’s $47m start in 1993 (which would be worth $76.3m today), suggesting that, not merely exploiting 3D and Imax revenues that weren’t possible back then, director Colin Trevorrow and his team somehow managed to breathe new life into the franchise’s alpha-male, event-movie credentials. Universal are playing a blinder in 2015, reaching $1bn domestic and $3bn international in record time on the back of Jurassic World, Furious 7, Fifty Shades of Grey and Pitch Perfect 2 – and the studio still has Minions, Ted 2 and others to come later in the year. Perhaps the biggest coup: Jurassic World has a $150m budget, hardly a tiddler but way off Avengers: Age of Ultron’s diplodocus-sized $280m. So it’s the profits that will be diplodocus-sized here.
Top five worldwide openings
1. Jurassic World, $524.1m
2. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, $483.2m
3. Furious 7, $397.6m
4. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, $394m
5. The Avengers, $392.5m
But is Jurassic World a true event movie, and what does that phrase even mean in 2015’s far more crowded and competitive field? That elusive must-see aura – a combination in 1993 of Hollywood’s most starred director Steven Spielberg and Industrial Light & Magic’s then-unique special-effects prowess – was what made Jurassic Park the first $1bn film; 22 years later though, Spielberg is only executive-producing, and CGI is very much the bog-standard grouting of the blockbuster industry. So Universal lured audiences with sly oneupsmanship regarding the scale of the new film – witness the gag in the trailer with the mosasaur swallowing a dangling great white – and let carefully calibrated nostalgia for the original do the rest.
Or perhaps, launching in the June high-summer slot that was the hotspot for the blockbuster from Jaws through to the late 90s, it’s nostalgia for the idea of the event-movie that it has tapped into. (What else does the park itself – the all-unifying entertainment spectacle – signify?) The mildly approving crop of reviews suggests that the film isn’t as momentous as it pretends to be, but it has unquestionably bolstered the franchise. The 1993 film made history partly because it brought in $626.7m of overseas cash, 60.3% of its overall takings, unusually high for an era in which US box office was still the majority force. Based on its first weekend, Jurassic World has almost the same overseas/US split, meaning it has shored up the international interest that was crumbling by the time of the 1997 and 2001 sequels. The $100.1m figure for the first Chinese week – the fourth biggest opening in the country – goes a long way in that regard.
Perhaps final grosses should be the arbiter on the event-movie question. $1bn in 1993 made it clear that Jurassic Park had punched through into the zeitgeist. That is worth $1.69bn today, which would make it the third highest grossing film ever. That accolade is currently held by The Avengers, which could probably justify event-movie status on the strength of its multiple-superhero concept. Furious 7 is currently about $8m short of The Avengers on the all-time list; Paul Walker’s death and the unexpected impact of the film gave it the sense of something out of the ordinary. Considering Jurassic World has opened bigger, and is in line to touch the $1.5bn benchmark required for the 21st-century event movie, you would have thought similar prostration might be already required. But even if it climbs that high, as with Avengers: Age of Ultron – which made the grade financially but felt somehow hollow – there are doubts in my mind as to Jurassic World’s claim on posterity. Is it enough for nostalgia to be the keynote of the film? But then if our culture is incurably nostalgic, then perhaps it counts as an event after all.
Quantum of solace
Melissa McCarthy’s 007-glamour sendup Spy may have underwhelmed in the US, but it currently displays a 58.5/41.5% international/US split – extremely high for a comedy (which, whether by nature or nurture, supposedly do not travel well). Higher, in fact, than every top 10 all-time grossing comedy apart from Ted (60.2% overseas) and The Hangover Part III (69% overseas) – and doubly striking in the case of a film without, as yet, a franchise. Fox favoured foreign territories with its leisurely rollout strategy, and they are the ones currently showing McCarthy and director Paul Feig some love: Spy dropped 45% in the States (bigger than previous McCarthy releases), but only 34% in the UK and under 20% in Germany, Holland, Belgium and Israel. In its top territory, South Korea, its current running total, $16.2m, has already outrun all of the Bond films, the source material for its lampooning; after Kingsman: The Secret Service’s top-tier performance ($46.9m) in the Asian country, it’s obvious that they take the business of international espionage extremely unseriously there. Spy has now infiltrated to the tune of $136.9m, the point at which it will start to make money on its $65m budget. The sharper McCarthy proves out in the overseas field, the greater the chance of a sequel.
The rest of the world
Bollywood brushed the global top 10 this week with romantic drama Hamari Adhuri Kahani taking $4.1m. The third film in the hookup between Vishesh Films and Fox’s Indian arm that also produced invisible-man thriller Mr X earlier this year, it focuses on a love triangle based on the real-life courtship of producer Mahesh Bhatt’s parents. Despite Fox’s involvement, this one may be a stretch for western tastes: our review calls it “a straight-faced hothouse melodrama, very much Bollywood trad, pitched at a level Hollywood rarely pursues, even in Nicholas Sparks flicks”. Other than that, only Toho’s 3D animation Stand By Me Doraemon – taking another $4m in China for 11th place globally – represented for the non-Hollywood brigade this week.
The future
In non reptile-related news, the animation battle of the summer gets under way next weekend. In the original-offering corner is Pixar’s Inside Out – a fantastic voyage through the turbulent, anthropomorphised world of an 11-year-old girl’s emotions when her parents uproot her and move to San Francisco. It impressed in an early glimpse at Cannes and, opening in 40 markets, looks to have a strong chance of restoring the reputation of the Disney subsidiary once regarded as the great lateral thinkers of digital animation. Not an accolade you’d hand to whoever greenlighted Minions, the inevitable spin-off of Universal’s Despicable Me series, the second of which got within grasping distance of $1bn worldwide in 2013. Charting the yellow underlings’ efforts down the ages to find a suitably tyrannical master, it begins a curiously circumspect rollout – for such dead-cert franchise bait – in Australia, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. Maybe they appreciate a good malefactor in Oceania.
Top 10 global box office, 12-14 June
1. (New) Jurassic World, $524.1m from 67 territories – 60.2% international; 39.8% US
2. San Andreas, $53.5m from 69 territories. $373.3m cumulative – 68% int; 32% US
3. Spy, $28.8m from 65 territories. $136.2m cum – 58.5% int; 41.5% US
4. Insidious: Chapter 3, $14m from 27 territories. $63.7m cum – 41.3% int; 58.7% US
5. Mad Max: Fury Road, $9.5m from 69 territories. $333.7m cum – 58.5% int; 41.5% US
6. Tomorrowland, $8m from 50 territories. $186.5m cum – 55.1% int; 44.9% US
7. Pitch Perfect 2, $8m from 47 territories. $261.9m cum – 34.8% int; 65.2% US
8. Entourage, $6.2m from 19 territories. $31.9m cum – 18.8% int; 81.2% US
9. Avengers: Age of Ultron, $5.6m from 42 territories. $1.36bn cum – 67.3% int; 32.7% US
10. (New) Hamari Adhuri Kahaani, $4.1m from 7 territories – 100% int
• Thanks to Rentrak. Some of this week’s figures are based on estimates; all historical figures unadjusted, unless otherwise stated.
