As was predicted, the fact that some kids in parts of the country are on Spring Break helped ‘Zootopia’ stay strong in its second week, raking in $50 million, dropping a mere 33% week-over-week. ‘Zootopia’ is currently trending along the lines of the Disney/Pixar smash ‘Finding Nemo’ and well ahead of more recent hits ‘Frozen’ and ‘Big Hero Six’. With few new family movies on the horizon, it looks to have quite some legs which could make it one of the highest grossing animated movies in memory.
The only other new movie to make a splash was ’10 Cloverfield Lane‘ which came in second with $25.2M, already making back its $16.3M budget. It’s unclear how well ’10 Cloverfield Lane’ will perform in the long run, as critics have given it great praise (91% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) while audiences have only given it a mediocre B- CinemaScore rating, about average for a horror movie. Apparently, the third act twist divided audiences who wound up either loving or hating it depending on how they thought the movie was going to go.
Here are the numbers:
- Zootopia (Disney) $50M
- 10 Cloverfield Lane (Paramount) $25.2M
- Deadpool (20th Century Fox) $10.8M
- London Has Fallen (Focus) $10.66M
- Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (Paramount) $4.6M
One distribution chief stated:
“There’s a weekend-to-weekend trend going on in the marketplace. One movie will overperform its tracking and dominate the social conversation as the ‘it’ movie, while the top spots are continually populated by strong holdovers. As such, the other new movies can’t rise to a value proposition in a way that they should.”
This is bad news for the week’s other new releases, none of which performed well enough to rank in the top five– ‘The Brothers Grimsby’, ‘The Young Messiah’ and ‘The Perfect Match’, however the last two were in limited release. For the number of screens it played on, ‘The Perfect Match’ actually did quite well for itself.
But as more and more big name films hit theaters, unfortunately, the studios releasing these underperforming films will need to lean on VOD and home video to make back their investments.
Next week sees the release of ‘The Divergent Series: Allegiant’, which may do well, but clearly this series is catering strictly to die-hards at this point as the cinematic outings have become less and less successful with each film.
And Easter weekend belongs to ‘Batman V Superman’ which regardless of fan reaction is at least guaranteed to open huge.
Check back next week to see how ‘Divergent’ does and if ‘Zootopia’ continues its reign!
Source: Deadline
