Box office preview: ‘The Little Mermaid’ looks to swim away with an easy Memorial Day victory
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It’s Memorial Day weekend, historically a great time for theaters to throw open their doors for the masses to come out and see a movie, whether it’s something new or something that’s been in theaters for a while. Read on for Gold Derby’s box office preview.
Disney is well aware of the amount of money film opening over Memorial Day can bring in normally, having had massive hits with 2007’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” ($139.8 million four-day weekend) and Guy Ritchie‘s 2019 live action “Aladdin” ($116.8 million opening). They’ve also had Memorial Day flops like “Prince of Persia: Sands of Time” starring Jake Gyllenhaal in 2010, which only opened with $37.8 million.
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“Aladdin” might be a better comparison of note for Disney’s live action revamp of “The Little Mermaid,” directed by Rob Marshall (“Chicago,” “Into the Woods”), starring newcomer Halle Bailey with Melissa McCarthy, Javier Bardem, as well having the voices of Awkwafina, Daveed Diggs and Jacob Tremblay behind some of the popular characters from the animated film.
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The original animated “The Little Mermaid” came out in 1989, one of the early movies in the “Jeffrey Katzenberg era” of Disney animation. Despite winning two Oscars (for original song and score), it only made $111 million in its initial run. In 1997, it was re-released, earning another $110 million over the holidays that year and showing how enduring the film and its music had become.
Disney has created quite a goldmine from these live action adaptations with the Jon Favreau-directed “The Lion King” from 2019 making $543.6 million domestic, following two years after the “Beauty and the Beast” live action adaptation starring Emma Watson, which also grossed over $500 million. In both cases, one can point to the popularity of the original movies – the animated “The Lion King” made $422.7 million in 1994, which was a LOT in those days – bringing success to the remakes, although Disney has been putting more of these on its streamer Disney+ in recent years. (Case in point: Robert Zemeckis‘ “Pinocchio” starring Tom Hanks, which, if not for COVID, might have received some kind of theatrical release.)
Reviews for “The Little Mermaid” came out earlier in the week, and they’re generally positive, currently with a 69% rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, but the popularity of the original animated film and its songs and curiosity about how it might translate to live action will drive business this weekend.
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Considering how well other adaptations of some of Disney’s biggest animated hits have done, we can probably expect “The Little Mermaid” to do similarly with a four-day opening weekend of somewhere between $125 and $145 million*, possibly even higher. It does have quite a bit of competition in June, but how it fares over the holiday will determine how much repeat business it gets in the busier month of June. (*Reminder that the Gold Derby game only accounts for three-day box office, which will probably still be over $100 million.)
Although “The Little Mermaid” will win the weekend with ease, Memorial Day weekend is also a great time for those who don’t get out to movies much to catch up on past releases. Because of that, Universal’s “Fast X” may have a smaller second weekend drop-off than usual – probably somewhere in the $35 million range – and both “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” and “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” should get nice bumps from the holiday weekend, as well.
There are quite a few other new movies, many in wide release, but many of them may face more of an uphill battle. For instance, the Middle Eastern political thriller “Kandahar,” starring Gerard Butler and Navid Negahban, directed by Butler’s regular collaborator, Ric Roman Waugh (“Greenland,” “Angel Has Risen”). It will be released by Open Road into an unknown number of theaters – probably around 2,500 – but it will be a real test to see if Butler can do better with this material than Jake Gyllenhaal did with “Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant” last month.
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That movie opened with just $6.4 million and presumably Butler is a bigger box office draw, despite his last film “Plane” opening with just $11.8 million over the MLK birthday weekend in January. “Kandahar” is less high-concept and therefore, a harder sell to audiences, and because of that, it’s likely to top out with roughly $5 to 8 million over the four-day weekend.
Possibly the oddest phenomenon this weekend is Lionsgate and Sony releasing “About My Father” and “The Machine” in roughly the same number of theaters (about 2,300), because they’re both comedies with stand-up comedians at their core. “About My Father” is a comedy from superstar Sebastian Maniscalco, whose appearances include a small role in the Oscar-winning Best Picture “Green Book” and in Martin Scorsese‘s “The Irishman.” This year alone, he’s appeared in three movies, including a voice role in the mega-blockbuster “The Super Mario Bros. Movie.” Maniscalco is a very popular comedian, and it won’t hurt that “About My Father” co-stars no less than Robert De Niro in that title role. Although it’s weird to release a movie like this over Memorial Day weekend, the lack of strong comedies should help this make upwards of $7 to 10 million over the four-day weekend.
“The Machine,” on the other hand, stars the lesser-known Bert Kreischer, with Mark Hamill playing his father, and it, too, is semi-based on events from his own life. It involves Bert and his father being kidnapped by Russian mobsters wanting revenge for infractions Bert committed while abroad during college. This looks funny enough, but not quite on the par with Manisalcol’s movie, and it’s likely to be weighted more towards college-age dudes, who have plenty of other choices. Personally, I’d be shocked if this makes more than $5 million over the four-day weekend.
Another movie getting a nationwide release this weekend is Nicole Holofcener‘s dark comedy, “You Hurt My Feelings,” reuniting her with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who starred in her last feature, “Enough Said.” The film premiered at Sundance and received solid reviews, but it’s also more of an indie that may have difficulty finding an audience in such a busy weekend. In the movie, Louis-Dreyfus plays an author who discovers that her husband (Tobias Mendies) does not like her most recent book, despite saying he did. It’s estimated to open in roughly 900 theaters this weekend, which should allow it to open in the top 10 with somewhere in the $1 to 2 million range.
Check back on Sunday (or possibly Monday) to see how the Memorial Day weekend box office did compared to previous years.
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