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Summer closed out with a final exclamation point as Straight Outta Compton defied expectations to debut with $60.2 million. The biographical drama about N.W.A. played heavily into nostalgia for the ‘80s and ‘90s as it took advantage of fantastic word-of-mouth to earn an eventual $161.2 million from the North American box office. It just barely crossed the $200 million mark worldwide. It’s currently nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and also received a Producers Guild nomination for Best Theatrical Motion Picture. If you haven’t been counting along, all the films I’ve mentioned so far combined for domestic box office of $2 billion. And yet, that number doesn’t count the studio’s single miss (which I’ll get to in a minute), their two horror releases, or a Christmas release. The horror releases were M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit, which had a tiny $5 million budget but opened to $25.4 million. Its eventual total was $65.2 million domestically (and worldwide was almost $100 million). Then there was Krampus, the December horror story that debuted with $16.3 million and pulled in $42.7 million in North America, all on a $15 million budget. When even your horror films are rocking, you know you’re having a great year. The studio’s Christmas holiday release was the Tina Fey/Amy Poehler comedy Sisters, which started off okay with $13.9 million but has a current domestic total of $83.4 million with still a little bit of gas in the tank. It had a $30 million budget, so once again, the studio had perfectly targeted a film to a welcoming demographic. I mentioned a solitary miss on the studio’s release schedule, and it does bear discussing. Ted 2, the sequel to the raunchy talking teddy bear comedy that earned $218.8 million during its domestic release in 2012, was an inarguable disappointment. Clearly, once was enough for most people with regards to the foul-mouthed bear, because the follow-up got started with $33.5 million over three days (a 39% decline from the first film’s $54.4 million opening) and ended its North American run with just $81.5 million. Ultimately, the budget was $68 million, and the movie did make $215.9 million worldwide and should do well on home video, but it certainly felt like the studio missed an opportunity here. But since it opened two weeks after Jurassic World, we’re guessing it didn’t sting too much. What may be the most remarkable about this remarkable domination of the box office is the consistency of it. Every time we had a story about Universal debuting a new film (with the exception of Ted 2, of course), we invariably talked about how the film overperformed and defied expectations. Kudos go to Universal both for picking such ideal projects and for perfectly marketing them in such a way that they broke outside of their established demographic base. It’ll be interesting to watch whether they rest on these laurels or attempt further domination and growth moving forward.
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