Weekend Wrap-Up

Mummy Flops; Summer Suck-O-Meter Continues Climb

By John Hamann

June 11, 2017

Oh, I can totally drink you under the table.

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Save us, Wonder Woman! All these films suck!

This summer, If your film is not a comic or superhero-based blockbuster, your expensive summer project is already in some serious trouble. That's the mark of Summer 2017.

After hopes were high that Wonder Woman and its $103.3 million domestic opening would reinvigorate a so far sad summer movie schedule, we are back to a reality that has plagued us all season long – poorly made films that audiences haven't wanted.




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The three weekends between Guardians and Wonder Woman were a wasteland of misses and flops that included King Arthur ($175 million production budget, $40 million in domestic earnings), Snatched ($42 million budget, $45 million gross), Alien: Covenant ($97 million budget, $70 million gross), Diary of a Wimpy Kid Part 3 ($22 million budget, $19 million domestic), and then Memorial Day, where Pirates 5 and Baywatch – costing a combined $300 million – together opened to only a $80 million, and are headed for domestic amounts lower than that budget.

Victims stepping up for destruction this weekend include the bad idea (and expensive to make) Mummy reboot, the Tom Cruise action flick (can we really say horror film?) that struggled badly this weekend. It would appear that neither the filmmakers nor the audience understood what Universal was going for, and Tom Cruise was a terrible choice as lead. This movie needed to open well, and in the last decade, Cruise hasn't had an opener above $37 million, save for two Mission Impossible films. Other openers included the much smaller horror flick, It Comes At Night, and the recently heavily marketed dog/war flick, Megan Leavey, with Kate Mara desperately trying to find a fanbase after making some epic failures like Fantastic Four, Morgan and Transcendence, one of the Johnny Depp bombs released over the last few years.This weekend is ugly, folks, with the only bright spot belonging to last weekend's openers

Our number one film of the weekend is not The Mummy. Instead, it is the second consecutive weekend for Wonder Woman, the lone bright spot of the DC Comics/Warner Bros Universe. After eclipsing $100 million over three days last weekend, the question became whether everyone rushed out to see what Wonder Woman was all about, leaving it frontloaded, or if the stellar reviews and Cinemascore would keep it propped up at box office. On its second Friday, Wonder Woman earned $15.8 million and was off 59% from opening day, where the $11 million in Thursday preview sales are combined with its first Friday. Without the pesky preview amounts, the Friday-to-Friday drop would have been less than 50%, and gave a signal to Warner Bros. and DC Comics that they were going to be happy by the end of the weekend. Why? 2008's Iron Man fell a similar 58%, but after an opening weekend close to what Iron Man achieved ($98 million Iron Man, $103.3 million Wonder Woman), Wonder Woman had stretched its lead to $22 million, after 8 days in release.


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