The Martian has now earned $108.7 million domestically in just ten days, and the hard sci-fi epic is doing very well overseas where it earned another $56.8 million, boosting its worldwide total to $226.5.
Second place went to the animated Hotel Transylvania 2, which earned $20.3 million and was clearly a more popular choice than Pan for family moviegoers. In a year when many animated features (other than Inside Out and Minions) have disappointed, Hotel Transylvania 2 is having a really solid run. It should be noted by the way that Pixar’s Inside Out has passed $800 million worldwide and is now the #3 movie domestically for 2015, trailing only Jurassic World and Age of Ultron.
Pan, which looks like it will be yet another 2015 disappointment for Warner Bros., was originally supposed to open this past summer before it was delayed due to the “need for reshoots,” and it appears that the studio had an inkling that it had a turkey on its hands. The fact that Pan was easily beaten by an animated film (Hotel Transylvania 2) in its third weekend says a lot about the domestic prospects for the Captain Hook-less Peter Pan saga. Warner Bros. only hope for Pan is that it will do well enough overseas to make up for some its domestic deficiencies, though the studio’s take from overseas revenues is a lot less than the 50% of receipts received from domestic showings.
So far Pan has made about $11.3 million overseas, though it is too early to see any definitive pattern. The key test will come on October 22 when it opens in China. Unless things turn around overseas, Warner Bros. is going to have a Fantastic Four-size write-down on its hands. To put Pan’s debut in perspective, its $15.5 million debut is way less than the bows of other similarly expensive flops like (Tomorrowland $33 million, John Carter $30 million, and The Lone Ranger $29 million).
Pan’s opening weekend audience was 55% female and 52% over 25 (not the kind of number a studio wants for a film targeting the family audience). The film’s “B+” CinemaScore, while nothing to write home about, isn’t quite as bad as the movie’s poor 23% positive rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
Nancy Meyer’s adult-skewing comedy The Intern continues its modest, but its strong run as it dropped just 26%, earning $8.66 million and bringing its domestic total to $49.6 million. Movies that are hits with older audiences tend to play longer, which means that the $35 million production will make a heck of a lot more money for Warner Bros. than Pan.
Sicario, The Maze Runner, and Black Mass all posted good holds, but Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk, which expanded to 2,500 locations after a disappointing IMAX-only debut last weekend, fared poorly. In spite of its 86% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, The Walk has yet to connect with audiences. It earned just $3.7 million, and The Walk will likely plunge bigtime next weekend when it loses most of its IMAX screens to Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak.
Mention should be made of the limited debut of the Danny Boyle/Aaron Sorkin Steve Jobs, which earned $531K from just four theaters. While a film’s limited release performance is no guarantee of mainstream success, Steve Jobs did earn the highest per screen average of the year so far, and the best since Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper debuted in just a handful of theaters.
Be sure and check back here next week to catch the results of what should be a very spirited box office derby thanks to the opening of Del Toro’s Crimson Peak, along with Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies starring Tom Hanks, and the heavily advertised all-ages horror film Goosebumps.
