“Inside Out 2,” with Anxiety personified in the lead role, continued to be very popular with moviegoers in its third weekend as the No. 1 movie in North America. The horror-filled prequel “A Quiet Place: Day One” also struck a cultural chord and enjoyed unexpectedly strong ticket sales.
But ticket buyers largely rejected Kevin Costner’s three-hour vanity project “Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1,” the supposed start of an Old West film series that once went straight to a streaming service before landing on the big screen.
Box office analysts estimated Sunday that Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” was on track to collect $57.4 million, for a three-week total of about $470 million in the United States and Canada. Global ticket sales for the well-reviewed sequel are approaching $1 billion. No film has reached this sales threshold since “Barbie,” which hit theaters in July 2023.
For the weekend, “A Quiet Place: Day One” was expected to generate about $53 million in domestic ticket sales – more than 30 percent above analysts’ pre-release expectations based on surveys measuring interest of moviegoers follow. In “A Quiet Place: Day One,” which cost Paramount an estimated $67 million to make, Lupita Nyong’o plays a cancer patient who, along with her cat Frodo, must deal with a horrific invasion of alien creatures with particularly sensitive ears.
Prequels are risky. Some of the most famous misfires include “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” “The First Omen,” and “Lightyear.” Fans already know what happens later in the story, making it difficult for studio marketers to create excitement, and prequels are often missing the stars that helped make the franchises popular in the first place. Emily Blunt, for example, headlined the first two Quiet Place films.
Day One’s strong performance is all the more impressive considering studio Paramount was recently embroiled in a confusing sales drama. The company’s majority shareholder, Shari Redstone, fired a top executive, haggled over a takeover bid and eventually called off the whole thing, sending its stock price plummeting. Despite these upheavals, the Paramount film team managed to successfully bring “Day One” to market.
Mr. Costner’s heavily promoted “Horizon,” which cost an estimated $100 million to produce and another $30 million to market, came in a distant third. Analysts say the company is on track to make $11 million. (Theaters and studios split ticket sales about half.) Mr. Costner had hoped that fans of the hit modern Western series “Yellowstone,” particularly from the middle of the country, would flock to the theaters. It turned out to be a pipe dream.
Could “Horizon” gain traction in the coming weeks? Box office experts were not optimistic and pointed to weak reviews. Additionally, ticket buyers gave “Horizon” a grade of B-minus in CinemaScore final surveys, meaning word of mouth will be soft.
Warner Bros. will release the second chapter on August 16th. Mr. Costner has already started production on part 3 and has also announced a fourth part.
Warner Bros. is merely acting as a rental distributor, meaning the studio has invested nothing in the films and therefore takes no financial risk. (The company takes a cut of ticket sales — about 8 percent — as compensation for its services.) To finance the project, Mr. Costner mortgaged real estate in Santa Barbara, California, and secured the backing of private investors. He left Yellowstone to concentrate on Horizon.
“There are films that defy the odds, stand out and prove the skeptics wrong,” said David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a box office newsletter. “In this case, the pattern is still intact: Westerns are not in fashion, and there has not been a successful Western cinema series in the last 50 years.”
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2024-06-30 15:45:18
www.nytimes.com
