Ant-Man scores small – but notable – victory at UK box office
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http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jul/21/uk-box-office-ant-man-victory-amy-andre-rieu-bollywood Version 0 of 1. The winner: Ant-Man Disney and Marvel have already scored a robust £48.3m this summer with Avengers: Age of Ultron. If that franchise film represented a safe bet, the partners’ other offering, Ant-Man, always felt more like a roll of the dice. The premise – an insect-sized superhero – doesn’t suggest an equivalently broad appeal, and then there was the issue of original director (and co-writer) Edgar Wright departing the project close to shooting. Would Marvel fans and cinema audiences in general line up for the film? The opening number, £4.01m, compares unfavourably with the debut of Guardians of the Galaxy last summer. That Marvel title kicked off with just under £5m, plus £1.37m in previews, for an opening tally of £6.36m. Among the 12 Marvel feature films where head creative honcho Kevin Feige carries a full producer credit, only 2008’s The Incredible Hulk (debut of £3.25m including £533,000 in previews) and 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger (£2.98m) began with smaller numbers. You might also include 2011’s Thor in that list, since its £5.45m opening included £2.34m in previews. Related: Paul Rudd on Ant-Man, being Hollywood’s go-to nice guy and growing up with English parents in Kansas Viewed away from the context of Marvel, Ant-Man’s £4.01m debut is actually pretty decent. Looking at some of the other blockbusters this summer, it’s very comparable with Mad Max: Fury Road, which began with £4.54m including £639,000 in previews back in May. And it’s ahead of Terminator Genisys, which kicked off with £3.79m including £716,000 in previews. The sustained runs: Jurassic World and Minions Jurassic World, now with cumulative box-office of £59.5m (the 10th-biggest gross ever in the UK), has just delivered a sixth weekend with more than £1m in takings. The last film to do so was Paddington, which enjoyed a very sustained run into Christmas 2014 and beyond. Minions, in its fourth weekend of play, managed a robust £2.70m. That’s actually ahead of the fourth-frame takings of Jurassic World, and is the biggest for a fourth session since The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies, which was the top-grossing release of 2014. Minions now stands at £32.3m. With kids now on school holiday, the film should continue to perform solidly. The documentary hit: Amy Achieving the gentlest decline in the Top 10 is Asif Kapadia’s Amy Winehouse documentary Amy, with a drop of 24%. Helping the sustain in box-office is the film’s modest expansion from 214 cinemas to 254. With £2.06m in takings so far, Amy is now the sixth-biggest documentary hit in the UK, excluding concert films. Amy should overtake fifth-placed Touching the Void (£2.64m) by the end of its run, and it has a shot at matching Kapadia’s own Senna, which reached £3.17m, and is in fourth place in the UK all-time chart. The event: André Rieu For classical music fans, the summer concert from Dutch violinist and conductor André Rieu is an annual highlight. Beamed into cinemas from his home town of Maastricht since 2011, the event has been steadily gaining in popularity over the years, achieving £831,000 from 395 UK cinemas exactly a year ago. This time around, Rieu has achieved his biggest UK box-office yet – £1.11m from 460 cinemas – a number that sets a new record for a music concert at UK cinemas, ahead of Take That Live and One Direction: Where We Are. While the Rieu number includes some takings from encore showings on Sunday, the event’s Saturday tally of £1.10m is the only time a music concert has grossed over £1m in the UK in a single day. The audience for Rieu skews 60-plus, and is viewed as infrequent cinemagoers. Pulling them in once a year every summer gives cinemas a chance to market relevant coming attractions to an audience that seldom comes through the doors. The Bollywood hits Related: Bajrangi Bhaijaan review: Salman Khan strong even when wet as he escorts mute six-year-old back to Pakistan With Eid, marking the end of Ramadan, falling on Saturday, the weekend proved a propitious time to release films aimed at the UK’s south Asian markets. Hindi title Bajrangi Bhajaan covers a lot of bases by featuring a Pakistani girl in India, and stars Salman Khan and Kareena Kapoor. A debut gross of £758,000 is the biggest for a Bollywood film since Dhoom 3 back in December 2013. The film’s site average of £6,831 was exceeded only by Ant-Man. Urdu romantic drama Bin Roye also achieved a very healthy average (£4,958), with £139,000 from just 28 cinemas. The also-rans Three films from heavyweight distributors opened on a combined 729 screens, achieving total box-office under £700,000. Warners offered horror title The Gallows, and scraped a site average above £1,000, with £336,000 from 315 venues. That’s an achievement that eluded Self/Less from director Tarsem Singh, starring Ryan Reynolds. Landing outside the top 10, the film debuted with a weak £215,000 from 267 cinemas. Fox’s True Story, starring Jonah Hill and James Franco, likewise fell short of £1,000 per venue, despite a relatively focused rollout into 147 cinemas. Takings of £137,000 earned True Story 15th place in the weekend chart. Secret Cinema rises again For the first time, Secret Cinema’s presentation of The Empire Strikes Back drops out of the UK top 10. The irony is that weekend takings of £304,000 are 6% up on the previous weekend, and are in fact the highest achieved so far. It’s also the first time that this run of Secret Cinema has cracked £300,000 in a single weekend. Now that schools are on holiday for the summer, takings for the event on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday should see a rise – so far, the bulk of tickets have been sold for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. With £2.60m so far, The Empire Strikes Back is currently on track to achieve a final gross of £6.5m. The future Related: Robert Carlyle: ‘Big films don’t feed your soul’ Takings are 2% up on the previous weekend, but 17% down on the equivalent frame from 2014, when Dawn of the Planet of the Apes landed with a previews-inclusive £8.7m splash at the chart summit. Cinema bookers can be reasonably confident of an uptick in the coming session, with the arrival of Pixar’s Inside Out, already a $306m hit in the US, and a $490m hit worldwide (with most key territories still to open). Alternatives include Jake Gyllenhaal boxing drama Southpaw, Arnold Schwarzenegger in Maggie, and French nightclub tale Eden, featuring music from Daft Punk and US garage house legends. Robert Carlyle’s directorial debut The Legend of Barney Thomson is likely to perform strongest in Scotland. Top 10 films July 17-19 1. Ant-Man, £4,011,345 from 555 sites (new) 2. Minions, £2,702,320 from 607 sites. Total: £32,293,570 3. Ted 2, £1,360,492 from 547 sites. Total: £7,042,645 4. Jurassic World, £1,136,220 from 517 sites. Total: £59,499,942 5. Andre Rieu’s 2015 Maastricht Concert, £1,107,000 from 460 sites (new) 6. Terminator Genisys, £823,384 from 460 sites. Total: £9,237,056 7. Bajrangi Bhaijaan, £758,195 from 111 sites (new) 8. Magic Mike XXL, £524,161 from 405 sites. Total: £5,501,254 9. The Gallows, £335,421 from 315 sites (new) 10. Amy, £315,421 from 254 sites. Total: £2,062,289 Other openers Self/Less, £215,247 from 267 sites Thomas & Friends: Sodor’s Legend of the Lost Treasure, £155,354 from 410 sites Bin Roye, £138,833 from 28 sites True Story, £137,463 from 147 sites The Salt of the Earth, £55,632 (including £18,745 previews), 26 sites Die Entführung aus dem Serail: Glyndebourne 2015, £45,966 from 37 sites Maari, £31,349 from 6 sites 13 Minutes, £12,572 from 17 sites The Wonders, £6,900 from 11 sites The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson, £2,970 from 10 sites |