Monsters University
You’ll see it mentioned a lot, but the conventional wisdom among the analysts was that the combination of warmer weather and the oxygen sucked out last weekend for Man of Steel and it’s word of mouth would make this a difficult weekend to figure out, but that it wouldn’t be a fantastic weekend. Instead, we got the 9th best opening weekend ever, and the best that this weekend has seen ever, with Monsters University hitting $82 million and World War Z hitting $66 million. Man of Steel dropped as one would expect, down to $41 million, but the combination of everything brought in a $230 million weekend overall with all the films out there.
Monsters University was expected to do well, though Pixar hasn’t been hitting it out of the park lately like they were a few years ago so expectations weren’t huge, but reasonable. With these numbers, it definitely builds off of what came before and it has little in the way of competition since Epic has fallen off, though it did hit $100 million domestically in its run.
The one that was really interesting to watch was World War Z as it had a lot of negative word of mouth among the diehard online film enthusiasts and watchers because of it being pushed back for extensive third act reshoots. With a big budget of near $190 million, a $66 million opening is definitely good and it hit up another $45 million overseas in just 30% of the territories that it’s opened in so far. With a global view to things, even if somewhat American centric while playing to the UN angle, the film has the potential to do well in many smaller markets and really build up an overall solid chest here that will keep it from being a write-off for Paramount. And potentially give them the ammunition they need to roll out another, which would likely be done cheaper and tighter with the knowledge from how this one went down.
Man of Steel is definitely an intriguing film to watch in its performance. While it fell off big here, though $41 million is nothing to sneeze at, it’s opened in more international markets and brought in an additional $89 million. That brings its international take to $188 million and its overall cume since start at $398 million.
| RANK | TITLE | DISTRIBUTOR NAME | WEEKEND REVENUE | CUME REVENUE | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| REVENUE | # OF LOCATIONS* | LOC AVG | ||||
| 1 | Monsters University | Disney | $82,000,000 | 4,004 | 20,479 | $82,000,000 |
| 2 | World War Z | Paramount | $66,000,000 | 3,607 | 18,297 | $66,000,000 |
| 3 | Man Of Steel | Warner Bros. | $41,215,000 | 4,207 | 9,796 | $210,005,947 |
| 4 | This Is The End | Sony | $13,000,000 | 3,055 | 4,255 | $57,791,524 |
| 5 | Now You See Me | Lionsgate | $7,870,000 | 2,823 | 2,787 | $94,450,976 |
| 6 | Fast & Furious 6 | Universal | $4,725,235 | 2,417 | 1,955 | $228,412,705 |
| 7 | Internship, The | 20th Century Fox | $3,425,000 | 1,916 | 1,787 | $38,364,505 |
| 8 | Purge, The | Universal | $3,411,550 | 2,201 | 1,550 | $59,427,995 |
| 9 | Star Trek Into Darkness | Paramount | $3,000,000 | 1,565 | 1,916 | $216,610,916 |
| 10 | Iron Man 3 | Disney | $2,175,000 | 924 | 2,353 | $403,120,000 |
| 11 | Bling Ring, The | A24 Films | $2,000,000 | 650 | 3,076 | $2,341,241 |
| 12 | Epic | 20th Century Fox | $1,730,000 | 1,994 | 867 | $100,985,125 |