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| Author | Zoe Aresti |
The Weekend Round-up
Fifty Shades Of Grey exceeded all expectations, opening with a gargantuan £13.6m. That’s by far the highest opening for an 18-certificate film, eclipsing 2001’s Hannibal (£6.4m) and it’s also higher than all three Hunger Games films opened with. It was always felt that there was no precedent for Fifty Shades and we have recently been using Gone Girl as a comparative 18-cert film. Gone Girl opened with £3.6m from Friday to Sunday and is the second highest grossing 18-cert film of all time with £22.4m (The Wolf Of Wall Street is first with £22.7m). Barring a huge collapse, Fifty Shades will have overtaken that by this time next week.
Big Hero 6 fell to second, adding £1.8m, and has now earned £9.9m. It’s well behind the pace of last year’s The Lego Movie but it should perform strongly this week while the schools are out.
Shaun The Sheep Movie stayed in third, falling just 17% to £1.7m. After ten days in cinemas the Aardman animation has banked £4.4m and will be expecting to add to that significantly over the next week.
Kingsman: The Secret Service fell to fourth but had a strong hold on its third weekend, falling just 27% to £1.6m. It has now earned an impressive £10.9m and will overtake Kick-Ass’ final total of £11.8m shortly.
Jupiter Ascending completed the top five, adding a further £828k and now has a cume of £2.8m.
Outside of the top five, Peppa Pig: The Golden Boots opened in sixth with £687k. The film is just 54 minutes long and it’s being reported that all tickets are at kids prices. With that in mind, it’s a solid start and should continue to perform solidly during half term.
On the second biggest weekend in the past 12 months, the box office was up 85% from last weekend and up 20% from the same weekend last year, when the top films were The Lego Movie, The Monuments Men, Robocop and Mr.Peabody And Sherman.
Next Weekend
On a quiet weekend for new releases when Fifty Shades Of Grey is once again expected to dominate, The Wedding Ringer is the highest profile new film. It previewed across the country on Valentine’s day and banked £163k on that one day, so should perform solidly when it goes on general release.
Blackhat is also out on Friday. Any Michael Mann (The Last Of The Mohicans, Heat, The Insider) used to be an event but after its disastrous performance in the US ($7.9m to date), we have drastically downgraded our expectations for this title.
Finally Cake is looking to target the art-house crowd. It was one of those titles hoping for awards recognition, mainly for Jennifer Aniston’s performance, but it sadly missed out and its box office expectations will be hit as a result.
The Buzz
Easter’s big family film Cinderella premiered at the Berlin Film Festival on Friday and the first wave of reviews are now in. The Guardian called it a ‘perky, pretty, lavender scented cupcake of a fairytale’, The Hollywood reporter said ‘the color, vibrancy and unabashedly romantic heart explode off the screen’ and Variety said that while it ‘could never replace Disney’s animated classic, it’s no ugly stepsister either, but a deserving companion’. It sounds like Disney have yet another family hit on their hands.
Across The Pond
On the biggest February weekend ever Fifty Shades of Grey opened with $85m, which is the highest debut ever for a film released in February. Kingsman: The Secret Service opened in second with an impressive $35.6m and The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water was in third, falling 45% to $30.5m and a cume of $93.7m. American Sniper was in fourth, falling 29% to $16.4m and on Sunday it crossed $300m. Jupiter Ascending completed the top five with $9.4m, and after ten days in cinemas has earned $32.6m.
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