Monday Morning Quarterback Part III
By BOP Staff
August 13, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Matthew Huntley: Eh, this an okay opening weekend and more or less right on target with my expectations given the material and marketing campaign, as well as the number of theaters that were showing it. I don't think the studio will turn a huge profit, if any, on the $18-million drama, but they won't lose a bundle, either. Ricki and the Flash won't earn Streep her latest Oscar nomination and will most likely get swept away into obscurity, and not because it's bad, per se, but because it just didn't make a very resounding impact. It feels like one of those movies you and your spouse might catch haphazardly on Netflix because it has Meryl Streep in it, but it's not one I feel anyone will actively seek out. With that said, I think it will cover its production budget while in theaters but will need help to cover its advertising costs.
Felix Quinonez: It's not good or bad but very expected. This movie seemed like it could have been memorable but judging by the reviews and trailers, the potential of the premise seems to have been squandered. The resulting film seems very predictable and will most likely be forgotten very soon.
Ryan Kyle: I think this is a pretty lousy opening. As I stated before, I think The Gift might have knocked a few million off of Ricki and The Flash. Opening in a similar amount of theaters as The Gift in hopes of adding a few hundred more in the upcoming weeks, Ricki's per theater average of $4,367 doesn't justify an expansion making the strategy backfire from opening wide immediately if even the targeted-area theaters can't get an audience.
Unless Sony couldn't cut a deal for the music rights, probably more than half of the $18 million budget went to Streep as nothing else about the production seems expensive. This is the kind of film that reviews matter for, and the collective reaction was about as equivalent to a shrug as you can get. The film even opened to less than half of Hope Springs in 2012, another Streep-Sony collaboration that opened over this same weekend. If Ricki follows Hope Springs' pattern, it would wind up with a final of roughly $35 million. However, I think something hovering in the $25-30 million range seems more likely for Ricki given its reviews and lack of any hype.
Edwin Davies: Well, it's the best opening for a Jonathan Demme film since The Manchurian Candidate in 2004, so that has to count for something.
Apart from it being exciting that Demme is taking a break from making documentaries about Neil Young to make a mainstream movie again, I think this is fine. It didn't get a huge push, either in terms of screens or marketing, and it seems that the whole strategy was geared towards a long run built on older audiences who have made Streep's other films into leggy hits. I'm not sure if that will happen since the support doesn't seem to be there - although the critics who liked the film seemed to really dig it - but this doesn't strike me as a disastrous start, but one that could go either way.
Michael Lynderey: I'm not sure that the film will have particularly good legs this time of year, and that's a shame. I enjoyed Ricki, a fairly entertaining crowd pleaser, and I think perhaps a December release date would have suited the film better. In many ways the film is similar to Meryl Streep's It's Complicated, so following a similar release strategy would have made sense, even if the films were never going to have matching box offices.
Ben Gruchow: I agree with Michael about the December time period feeling more appropriate; this is a slight little movie that feels tailor-made for the holiday crowd and not the end-of-summer period. It's the type of thing that would've still opened fairly small, but benefited immensely from the Christmas/New Year's box-office haven.
Kim Hollis: Aardman Animations' Shaun the Sheep earned $4 million this weekend and has $5.6 million since debuting on Wednesday. What do you think of this result?
Felix Quinonez: I think it's fine. I don't think Americans are really the main audiences for Aardman films. The studio seems to agree seeing as how they released the movie in less than 2,500 theaters. They will probably see a nice profit overseas though so it should be a small hit.
Ben Gruchow: This is a little disappointing, and well below Aardman's other U.S. films. StudioCanal is a smaller distributor than Sony or DreamWorks, so I can understand why the venue count was lower than the 3,400-3,700 range of the earlier movies from the studio. 2,320 venues isn't nothing, though; it's more than two of the other three films released this weekend got, and I'm fairly certain (without having seen Ricki and the Flash yet) that it's cozily the best of them. Granted, it's already made $60 million overseas, but Aardman's stop-motion budgets have gone up, and a budget for this one in the $30-$40 million range wouldn't really surprise me. The studio's approach to animation absolutely isn't for everyone; there is no way that this slim 85-minute film isn't better than something like Minions in just about every way. This result is lower than the movie deserves.
Ryan Kyle: It's hard not to call this a terrible opening when even George Lucas's Strange Magic fiasco opened higher back in January. Lionsgate released the film too late in my opinion. Shaun opened in the UK in February (where it made a big chunk of its $60 million overseas gross) and hit DVD shelves there in June, so any diehard Aardman fan already has had plenty of opportunity to see it, surely knocking off of its gross. If anything, it feels as if the US release was a contractual obligation.
There hasn't been any new animation since Minions, which is five weeks old now, so this was a prime frame for Shaun to pop with a higher opening in the $10 million range. There is nothing at all remotely kid friendly until Hotel Transylvania 2 at the end of September, but with an opening in 2,320 theaters and not even cracking the top 10, I don't think venues will keep it around long enough for it to even develop legs. I would blame the lack of success on the marketing, because I honestly had no clue what this movie was about or even heard of it until I saw it listed on Fandango this past week while looking up showtimes.
Edwin Davies: Even though it pains me to see an Aardman film not doing well, I can completely understand why Shaun the Sheep didn't break out. The release seemed to be treated as something of an afterthought - no doubt because the film had already been such a success elsewhere - and wasn't really pushed that hard. It's also an odd film since it's stop-motion, features almost no dialogue, and is aimed at a very young audience so it wouldn't have the cross-generational appeal of even Minions.
More important, the Shaun the Sheep TV series, of which this is a spin-off, doesn't have much of a foothold in the States, so name recognition would have been practically zero. At best, the character would be remember as a supporting player in a short film released 20 years ago. Actually, when you put it that way, $5.6 million doesn't seem that bad.