West Side Story disappoints, but at least it's not National Champions.
2021 looked like it would be a good year for musicals. Alas, two adaptions of recent Best Musical Tony winners, In the Heights and Dear Evan Hansen, fizzed at the box office, and two other musicals, Cinderella and Everybody's Talking About Jamie, were shuttled off to Prime, where they debuted to largely negative reviews before disappearing out of sight. Tick...Tick...Boom! at least got good notices and might land Andrew Garfield an Oscar nomination, but is still largely a niche Netflix entry. In that environment, it's not too surprising, though awfully disappointing, that Steven Spielberg's much-anticipated redo of West Side Story landed with a thud.
The musical, starring Ansel Elgort and newcomer Rachel Zegler, drew raves, but could only pull in $10.6 million opening weekend, or less than what In the Heights made during its underwhelming opening--at that was also streaming on HBO Max. Story, on the other hand, isn't streaming anywhere. To be fair, early December has long been somewhat of a rough time at the box office, and Christmas releases, thanks to the extremely lucrative Christmas-New Year's week and a January mostly filled with junk, tend to have longer legs than films released elsewhere in the year, especially if they are award contenders, as Story most definitely is. Still, even with that in mind, everyone involved was hoping for an opening a bit better than that.
Indeed, it was nearly eclipsed by two-time champ Encanto, which slid to second with $10 million. While not a blockbuster, Disney's latest is easily the highest-grossing animated title since Frozen II and will likely be hitting $100 million well before the end of the year. It currently stands at $71.9 million.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife continues to show some life, as the action comedy sequel/reboot brought in $7.1 million for a total of $112 million. In fourth, House of Gucci also continues as one of the rare films aimed squarely at adults to be doing solid business. It brought in $4.1 million for a total of $41.1 million. With Christmas coming, both these films might be able to earn another $20-25 million or so.
In its last week of having the superhero genre all to itself, Eternals grossed $3.2 million for a total of $161.3 million. Horror flop Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City continues to hang around, scaring up $1.7 million for a total of $15.9 million. Family hit Clifford the Big Red Dog earned $1.7 million, for a total of $47.7 million.
Most films this week held up very well. Not Christmas With the Chosen: The Messengers. The concert film/Nativity narrative has proven to be very front-loaded, with its second weekend down to $1.2 million. Its 12-day total is $13.4 million, and it seems likely to fall short of $20 million, though given how unheralded the film was to begin with, even this gross is near miraculous.
Rounding out the Top Ten are two long-running October releases that each made less than a million: Dune and Venom: Let There Be Carnage. They're standing at $106.2 million and $212 million, respectively.
Both those films, along with fellow October blockbuster No Time to Die had better weekends--on fewer screens--than the week's other wide newcomer, National Champions. The college football drama somehow got simutaiousnly intercepted and sacked, as it could muster up only $0.3 million. The only two new films to open lower while debuting on over 1000 screens was 2007's Sarah Landon and the Paranormal Hour and 2009's Transylmania, neither of which starred anyone you had ever heard of. If you want to catch National Champions, you'd better hurry, as it will likely be down to just one showtime at most theaters by Friday.
This weekend brings the highly anticipated opening of Spider-Man: No Way Home, in which Spidey's plan to have Dr. Strange make everyone forget he's Peter Parker backfires, allowing villains from prior Spider-Man franchises (most prominently, Alfred Molina's Doc Ock) to invade the MCU. This is widely expected to be the first film since The Rise of Skywalker two years ago to debut to over $100 million. While I have seen some estimates projecting it will pass Skywalker's $177.4 million opening, I suspect it will open somewhere below that, though I wouldn't be surprised to see it top Frozen II's $130.3 million arrival. Bravely competing with Spidey is Nightmare Alley, a stylish neo-noir from Guillermo del Toro, starring Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, and Willem Dafoe (doing double duty this weekend). How big will No Way Home open to? Will Nightmare attract the adult audience that eluded West Side Story? Will the musical display strong second-weekend legs? We'll find out next week.
No comments:
Post a Comment