The winner
With kids breaking up last Friday for the two-week Easter holiday, family films dominated the UK box office, nabbing the top three places. King of the heap is Cinderella, with an encouraging debut of £3.80m, ahead of Home and The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water. Cinderella’s opening number compares with £3.59m including £976,000 in previews for Snow White and the Huntsman three years ago, and £6.59m including previews of £2.77m for Maleficent last May. Cinderella’s tally, in fact, approaches Maleficent’s number, once the latter’s previews are stripped out: £3.82m. With Cinderella and Home occupying the top two spots, the market is demonstrating the power of female protagonists.
Also in the top five is Insurgent, starring Shailene Woodley. A troubling majority of Hollywood films feature a male character at the centre, and that’s as true for family films as it is for other genres – the first 12 Pixar features featured a male protagonist, for example. With Home delivering £2.60m at the weekend, down a slim 24% from its opening frame, and SpongeBob offering £2.26m including previews of £682,000, the big three family films contributed a collective £8.67m to the weekend box office. With a further two weeks of play before kids return to school, there’s plenty more cash on the table to be collected.
The broad comedy
When Get Hard, starring Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart, premiered two weeks ago at SXSW, many initial reactions labelled the humour as racist and homophobic. But the controversy appears not to have hurt the box office, and distributor Warners should be satisfied with a UK debut of £1.44m. Ferrell’s last leading role was Anchorman 2, but that sequel to his best-loved film is hardly an apt comparison for Get Hard, and nor is 2012’s The Campaign, a satirical comedy about US politics co-starring Zach Galifianakis, which struggled to connect in foreign markets. Before that, Ferrell had indie Mexican western Casa de mi Padre, indie dramedy Everything Must Go and action comedy The Other Guys, co-starring Mark Wahlberg. None of these titles make for a particularly pertinent comparison, but The Other Guys debuted with £1.98m in September 2010. As for Hart, he’s coming off The Wedding Ringer, which opened in February with £990,000 including £164,000 in previews. His biggest UK hit is Ride Along, which kicked off just over a year ago with £1.42m, an almost identical number to Get Hard’s debut.
The fantasy flop
Seventh Son arrives in UK cinemas three years after filming began, and more than two years after the original scheduled release date. Produced by Thomas Tull’s Legendary Pictures, and originally slated for UK release via Warners, the film jumped distributor when Legendary switched its co-financing arrangement to Universal in 2014 – you might consider it a rather dubious welcoming gift to the studio.
Although Seventh Son has, in fact, fared well in some territories such as Russia and China, the US result was a pretty dire $17m for a film with a production budget reported to be $95m. In the UK, Seventh Son has opened with a weak £412,000 from 387 cinemas, delivering a £1,064 average. The film, which stars Ben Barnes, is rather classed up with garlanded actors including Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore, Olivia Williams and Djimon Hounsou, with Alicia Vikander and Kit Harington also in the mix. Direction is by Russia’s Sergei Bodrov (who directed the Oscar-nominated Prisoner of the Mountains), and the department heads include triple-Oscar-winning production designer Dante Ferretti. A surprising amount of highly respected creative talent has been funnelled into a film that enjoys a poor 30/100 MetaCritic score and a 5.6/10 IMDb user rating.
The art-house hit
So far in 2015, notable foreign-language films have been in very short supply, with indie cinemas packed out for the first three months of the year with English-language awards fare such as The Theory of Everything, Birdman, Whiplash, Selma, Wild, Into the Woods, American Sniper, Foxcatcher, Still Alice, Testament of Youth and Inherent Vice. Modest exceptions include White God and Mommy. Studio Ghibli animation The Tale of the Princess Kaguya has been playing in both dubbed and subtitled versions. Now, at last, a bona fide foreign-language hit has arrived in the shape of Wild Tales, a dark comedy featuring six twisted vignettes, from Argentina’s Damián Szifrón. The Pedro Almodóvar-produced film has debuted with a very healthy £183,000 from 50 cinemas, including previews of £9,700. The screen average is a robust £3,668. Excluding Bollywood titles, this is the biggest opening for a foreign-language film since The Raid 2 a year ago. The distributor Curzon and the cinemas that had booked to play Wild Tales must have suffered concern when the Germanwings plane was deliberately crashed into the Alps last Tuesday. The very first of the six stories features a plane that is likewise deliberately crashed by its pilot. Curzon issued a statement to all cinemas playing the film, and the distributor reports that it has yet to hear of customer complaints.
The documentary hit
Despite the success of Wild Tales, the art-house market was able to accommodate another flourishing title in the shape of Dior and I. Documenting the experiences of Belgian minimalist Raf Simons as he prepares his first haute couture collection for feted French label Christian Dior, the film debuted with £82,000 from 34 cinemas, including previews of £22,000. This represents the first significant hit for a fashion-themed documentary since The September Issue, in September 2009. Most recent documentaries achieving significant box office have done so by premiering as a live event with talent Q&A or a performance element, satellite-relayed into cinemas. Exceptions from the past year that went the traditional-release route are Twenty Feet from Stardom, which debuted with £62,400 from 65 cinemas, and Citizenfour, beginning with £53,900 from 23 venues. Stripping out Dior and I’s previews, the film has opened with similar numbers. The success of both Wild Tales and Dior and I effectively created a pincer movement on the other major indie film vying for the attention of art-house audiences: Michael Winterbottom’s The Face of an Angel. That title debuted with a lacklustre £36,900 from 37 cinemas, delivering an average just below £1,000. Reviews were decidedly mixed, although no major critic was as wildly negative as the Guardian’s own Peter Bradshaw.
The theatre events
The category known as event cinema flourished last week, with two major presentations. Last Monday, the pre-filmed Maxine Peake as Hamlet, staged at Manchester’s Royal Exchange theatre, went out to cinemas nationwide, and on Thursday, the Young Vic’s production of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, starring Mark Strong, was beamed from its sold-out West End run by National Theatre Live. Including encores at the weekend, the events have grossed a respective £296,000 and £651,000.
The future
Thanks to the arrival of Cinderella and other new titles, plus a strong hold for Home, takings are 9% up on the previous frame and 19% up on the equivalent weekend from 2014, when Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Muppets Most Wanted landed in the top two spots of the chart. The good news for cinemas is certain to continue, thanks to the arrival this Friday of Fast & Furious 7, the final film in the series to feature Paul Walker. Delayed for release from last year to allow extra shooting and digital fixing following Walker’s untimely death, the film is the recipient of scorching tracking numbers, according to industry word. Life will be tough for other new releases, but Noah Baumbach offers a well-regarded upscale alternative in the shape of indie comedy While We’re Young, starring Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried. Russell Crowe directs himself in The Water Diviner, and the BFI offers Blade Runner: The Final Cut. Cliff Curtis stars in New Zealand gritty drama The Dark Horse.
Top 10 films Mar 27-29
1. Cinderella, £3,803,799 from 554 sites (new)
2. Home, £2,601,755 from 546 sites. Total: £9,309,731
3. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, £2,262,498 from 483 sites (new)
4. Get Hard, £1,438,389 from 330 sites (new)
5. Insurgent, £1,307,487 from 505 sites. Total: 5,154,451
6. The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, £432,477 from 374 sites. Total: £14,477,633
7. Seventh Son, £411,576 from 387 sites (new)
8. Focus, £293,243 from 296 sites. Total: £7,093,508
9. Wild Tales, £183,423 from 50 sites (new)
10. Still Alice, £169,144 from 176 sites. Total: £2,101,047
Other openers
Dior and I, 34 sites, £59,594 (+ £22,254 previews)
Maxine Peake as Hamlet, 108 sites, £62,537 (+ Monday takings of £233,962)
The Face of an Angel, 37 sites, £36,912
The Signal, 7 sites, £10,103
A View from the Bridge, 6 sites, £8,632 (+ Thursday takings of £642,017)
Valiyavan, 10 sites, £6,815100
Days of Love, 4 sites, £4,291
Robot Overlords, 30 sites, £4,147
Blind, 6 sites, £3,520
Kocan Kadar Konuş, 1 site, £2,157
