After a smaller-than-expected start on Friday, Dwayne Johnson and Naomi Harris’ Rampage kicked into gear on Saturday.
The Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc. and New Line Cinemas video game adaptation won the weekend and, more importantly, posting a decent Fri-Sun figure.
Granted, $34.5 million isn’t a king’s ransom when it comes to a $120m release, but A) it’s about on par with Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and B) it’s a strong 3x weekend multiplier. For the record, absolutely no one is expecting legs on par with Jumanji, which opened with $36m over the Fri-Sun portion of its Wed-Sun debut and legged it to $403m.
But Rampage is getting solid audience polling grades (an A- from Cinemascore and an A from the under-18 crowd) and won’t have blockbuster competition until Avengers: Infinity War on April 27.
If it survives that one, it gets another three weeks before Deadpool 2 on May 18. The performance isn’t unlike Kong: Skull Island, which snagged a $20 million Friday and then legged it to a $61m Fri-Sun weekend during Logan’s second buzzy frame.
Even with ridiculous amounts of competition, the well-liked (and quite good) monster movie earned a respectable $168m domestic along with strong overseas business.
If Rampage follows a similar path, or plays like San Andreas ($155 million/$55m), we’re looking at a 2.7-2.8x multiplier and a $95-$98m domestic total.
That isn’t spectacular (it’s about in line with A Wrinkle in Time but with much bigger overseas grosses) but is halfway decent. The doomsday scenario is that it plays like Johnson’s (underrated) Hercules, which earned a 2.4x multiplier from a $29m debut back in July of 2014.
That would give Rampage a mere $85m finish. The crazy-optimistic scenario sees the monster mash legging it like Central Intelligence (3.5x) and getting to $128m domestic.
A $35 million debut isn’t all that hot, but I am impressed by the multiplier and the movie works, especially on its target audience. It is, by default, the best video game movie ever made, and it delivers plenty of what moviegoers paid to see.
It just scored (sans inflation) the third-biggest debut weekend for a video game adaptation behind the $47m opening weekend of Tomb Raider back in 2001 and the $38m opening of Sony’s animated Angry Birds movie two years ago. And, for what it’s worth, it’s also Johnson’s second-biggest non-ensemble debut behind San Andreas.
The film did well overseas as well, earning $55 million in China from a $15.7m opening day and snagging a $114m overseas cume. The film has now earned $148.6m worldwide. That’s not far off from Pacific Rim: Uprising‘s $150m launch, but the hope is that the bigger domestic number and better Chinese word-of-mouth will play out accordingly for a leggier run.
And, again. Uprising cost $150m while Rampage cost $120m, so the scale for success is slightly different.
Universal and Blumhouse‘Truth or Dare,’ with Tyler Posey, Lucy Hale, Hayden Szeto, and Violett Beane
The other big opener was Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare. Even with (unfairly) poor reviews and brutal competition from the sensational A Quiet Place, the Lucy Hale-led horror flick earned a perfectly good $19 million Fri-Sun debut.
Yes, it was bolstered by Friday the 13th, but that was the point of opening it on a Friday the 13th. Sure, it was terribly frontloaded (2.3x) and probably won’t top $50m domestic, but that’s relatively fine for the $5m release. Universal/Comcast Corp.’s Truth or Dare kind of dinged Universal’s own Blockers a bit, but that’s a conversation for another day.
That this poorly reviewed chiller still pulled in best-case-scenario business even with A Quiet Place doing its thing is a sign that A) the audience for horror is strong enough to handle two big titles and B) Blumhouse has truly become a brand unto itself.
The throwback “watch pretty people die in over-the-top ways” chiller (think Ouija meets Final Destination) will probably have legs closer to Insidious: The Last Key than Split, but even legs like Happy Death Day ($55 million/$26m) still gets the flick to $42m domestic. That’s firmly in the realm of “not bad.”
Fun Academy debuted the animated Sgt. Stubby An American Hero into 1,685 theaters with zero buzz and no interest. Folks who saw the Word War I-set toon gave it an A Cinemascore grade, but that doesn’t mean much when you barely crack $1 million on your debut weekend. Bleecker Street’s Beirut opened in 755 theaters on Wednesday.
The pretty solid, old-school Jon Hamm/Rosamund Pike political drama, just the sort of thing that would have been a healthy studio programmer back in the day, didn’t make much noise and snagged a poor $1.655m Fri-Sun/$2.1m Wed-Sun debut.
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Source: Forbes
