The winner
No subtle analysis needed for Furious 7, thrumming past a set of new records on its third weekend. It passed the $1bn worldwide mark on Friday 17 April, after 17 days on the grid, the fastest film to do so yet. At $1.12bn by the weekend’s close, it is Universal’s highest grossing film ever and the seventh highest grossing film of all time. The final debut, in Japan, was underwhelming ($6m – but still a series high), but China was still motoring along at $245.9m – not that far short of the US gross in about half the screening days, and ranking it second in the Chinese all-time list. Top spot, Transformers: Age of Extinction ($301m), is tantalisingly within reach.
One footnote: nitpicky it may be to criticise a film that feels as close to an “event movie” as you get these days, but could Furious 7 have done better? Its audience for that $147.2m opening US weekend was a surprisingly high 49% female, which led some to question whether it had properly rinsed what you would deem to be its core audience: young men. Or perhaps, with F&F now an all-encompassing cultural property, James Wan’s instalment has done a particularly good job pulling in the female audience. Actually, Furious 6 also pulled in a 49% female audience on its opening weekend in May 2013, which suggests at the very least that basic assumptions about certain kinds of material – in the case of F&F, that boy-racing and scantily clad ladeez might deter woman viewers – don’t always hold true. Run All Night, Liam Neeson’s latest geri-action underwhelmer, opened at 52% female – suggesting women are drawn in by the paternal bent to his recent run of crinkly avengers. Or perhaps they just like seeing people get shot in the head, too.
Comedians who travel
Kevin James’s stalwart mall watchdog Paul Blart, this time wreaking havoc at a Las Vegas security guards convention, confounded the critics on his return: a $23.7m US opening that is a respectable rejoinder to the 2009 original’s $31.8m, despite the film currently polling 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. What’s promising for James is that the series, which you’d expect to be as US-centric as the first (which earned nearly 80% at home), is showing signs of digging in overseas: Latin America was up consistently across the region (Mexico, Paul Blart 1: $621K; Paul Blart 2: $1.7m / Venezuela, PB1: $222K; PB2: $480K / Colombia, PB1: $62K; PB2: $175K). James, who came up through standup on US talkshows and broke into cinema with 2005’s Hitch, is going to need more of the same in the 20 or so upcoming markets if he’s going to climb a rung on comedy’s international pecking order.
Paul Blart producer Adam Sandler did just that in 1998, when The Wedding Singer, his first international hit, pushed his foreign percentages into the 30s, where they stayed for much of the noughties. Consistently having that kind of reach is tough for comedy stars – whether because the old adage is true that comedy doesn’t travel, or because everyone believes it anyway, leading to conservative distribution of such films. Even today’s very biggest laugh-mongers struggle to maintain 30+% overseas audiences outside of, in Ben Stiller’s case, the Fokkers franchise; or if, in Seth Rogen’s case, the premise isn’t universal enough (Neighbours grossed 44% overseas, but Pineapple Express only 14.1%). Or they struggle to breach this threshold at all, as with Will Ferrell, who has only managed the feat with The Other Guys. James’s appeal may be growing, but he is going to have to up his game beyond low-grade pratfalls to join their company. A true global comedy titan like Jim Carrey – who has barely dropped below 40% since The Mask made an astonishing 65.9% abroad in 1994, when he was little-known – is a once-a-decade phenomenon.
Off to the gulag
Russia last week banned Tom Hardy’s new Soviet-era thriller Child 44 for portraying the country as “Mordor”, but they needn’t have bothered. Pulling in a meagre $600,000 from 500 theatres in the US and $2m globally from 25 markets to finish 16th, the $50m film is looking like it will, unfortunately for studio Summit Entertainment, vanish without a trace. Drawn from the 2008 novel by Tom Rob Smith, Child 44 has a fascinating premise and setting – a Stalinist hero investigates a series of child murders in a society that dismisses murder as a capitalist affliction. But Summit failed to convincingly package this as either an upscale thriller along the lines of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, as implied by a powerhouse cast also featuring Gary Oldman, Noomi Rapace and Paddy Considine; or as something racier à la The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or Gone Girl (indeed, the film itself falls awkwardly between these two stools).
Tom Hardy, whose performance (accent aside) is strong, has no track record as a lead in films of this size; probably no cause for concern for the forthcoming Mad Max followup, where the franchise should do the heavy lifting, but definitely a risk factor in terms of propping up a $50m gig. Judging by the size of the US release, parent company Lionsgate never felt inclined to bet big on Child 44. As for the debacle over the Slavic-slathered English spoken by the entire cast, it further highlights the uncertainty about whether Child 44 was intended for the multiplex or the arthouse. Presumably a decision made to placate the former, opting to turn the film into an Iron Curtain version of ’Allo ’Allo damaged its integrity. Aren’t we past this kind of cultural bastardisation? It is possible for foreign-language films to cross over: The Lives of Others, which meted out its own totalitarian intrigue in German, took $66m overseas – the kind of cash Child 44 will never see.
The rest of the world
With French comedian Jamel Debbouze’s unexpected foray into animation Pourquoi J’ai Pas Mangé Mon Père? still clinging to the nether regions of the chart from last week, the biggest non-Hollywood new entry was Chinese romcom Ever Since We Love. In second place in that country – dwarfed by Furious 7 – Li Yu’s film, starring box-office queen Fan Bingbing and pop singer Han Geng, took $10.4m for sixth place globally; judging by the trailer, it looks to be larking around with some Wong Kar-wai pastiche. Aardman’s Shaun the Sheep was back in the pen, shearing off $3.2m from 13 markets, including a $730K No 2 debut in Spain, to take its running total to $54m – still some work to do to match even the studio’s least successful, Pirates! Band of Misfits ($123.1m). Further down was Fox Star India’s X-Men-styled invisible-man caper Mr X, one of the year’s higher Indian openings with $3.2m and, in at 13th, a rare Bollywood registering on the worldwide chart. “Definitely not a patch on Kevin Bacon’s Hollow Man,” sneered the Hindustan Times, not exactly picking the loftiest of comparison points. That was typical of a caustic bunch of reviews, so it looks as though a few brushstrokes of Hollywood-style marketing might have done wonders.
The future
There is only one game in town next week as Disney and Marvel empty their superhero party-pack Avengers: Age of Ultron all over the world’s multiplexes. In the wake of the first film’s mammoth $1.5bn worldwide take, which put it behind Titanic as the third highest grossing film ever, it’s easy to forget how suddenly it filtered through to mainstream audiences; only the geek contingent, as late as a couple of months before the film’s release in April 2012, were familiar with the Avengers brand (not that it required too much explanation). There’s much more expectation this time around, with early reports spinning pre-release sales as a guarantee of another impending box-office record. We’ll see – but all the crowdpleasing ingredients seem to be in place again, most crucially the Joss Whedon script that made the first such spry entertainment. Around 35 territories – most of Europe and much of south-east Asia – assemble this frame, with another 30, including the US, the Middle East and Latin America on May Day weekend. China, the No 2 territory last time round with $84.1m, drops two weeks later.
Top 10 global box office, 17-19 April
- Fast and Furious 7, $196m from 68 territories. $1.12bn cumulative – 74.5% international; 25.5% US
- Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, $31.1m from 42 territories. $34.1m cum – 29.6% int; 70.4% US
- Home, $20.7m from 65 territories. $271.6m cum – 47.5% int; 52.5% US
- (New) Unfriended, $16m from 1 territory – 100% US
- Cinderella, $11.3m from 48 territories. $475.7m cum – 59.3% int; 40.7% US
- (New) Ever Since We Love, $10.4m from 1 territory – 100% int
- The Longest Ride, $9m from 34 territories. $29.7m cum – 20.9% int; 79.1% US
- The Divergent Series: Insurgent, $8.2m from 84 territories. $262.2m cum – 54% int; 46% US
- Run All Night, $6.3m from 52 territories. $54.5m cum – 52.3% int; 47.7% US
- Woman In Gold, $5.7m from 5 territories. $19.3m cum – 17.6% int; 82.4% US
• Thanks to Rentrak. Some of this week’s figures are based on estimates; all historical figures unadjusted, unless otherwise stated.
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