Box office report, August 28–30: Britain votes with its feet – cinema is back!
Tenet helps UK cinemas achieve a 355 per cent boost
Since cinemas reopened in England on July 4 – and in the other UK nations on various dates in July – box office has been mediocre at best. A relatively stealthy reopening programme went hand-in-hand with a rather cautious set of new releases from distributors. And while cinema operators have taken their time to open up their whole estates of venues, they have been positively eager when compared to the US studios (Disney, Universal, Warner Bros, Sony and Paramount), none of which released a new film post-lockdown until last week.
That all changed last Wednesday, when Warner Bros released Tenet into 611 UK and Ireland cinemas. Tenet’s weekend box office for the territory is £3.29m, rising to £5.34m including Wednesday and Thursday. Market share is 78 per cent.
For the weekend period, Tenet has delivered the biggest number since Sonic the Hedgehog’s £4.17m weekend in late February. If the previews are included, Tenet’s £5.34m session is the biggest for a film since 1917 in mid-January.
For the total UK and Ireland market, data gatherer Comscore is reporting £6.32m from 641 venues for the weekend session (including all previews), which compares with £1.39m from 516 venues the previous weekend – a box office rise of 355 per cent. In 2019, average weekend takings for UK and Ireland were £15.4m, which means that the release of one popular film has not been enough to bring cinemas back to pre-Covid levels. On the other hand, the market is now at 41 per cent of 2019 levels, as opposed to just 9 per cent prior to the release of Tenet.
Compared to other Christopher Nolan films, Tenet is running behind the pace – but not lamentably. Dunkirk, which had the advantage of pre-existing audience interest in its subject, began with an imposing £10.02m back in July 2017. Before that, Interstellar kicked off with £5.38m in November 2014. Interstellar reached £20.7m by the end of its run in UK and Ireland, and Warner Bros will be aiming for Tenet to match it. Helping it get there should be repeat business, as Nolan enthusiasts watch Tenet a second and possibly third time, puzzling the intricacies of the time-travel storyline.
Globally, Tenet grossed $53.6m in its opening session, across 41 territories. Top four markets were UK and Ireland, France, South Korea and Germany. IMAX accounted for $5m of the total. The film arrives in US cinemas this Thursday (September 3).
Family films stay strong
Tenet may have sucked up a huge number of showtimes on vast swathes of cinema screens, but family films, at least, have not suffered as a consequence. Cinema operators can programme family titles in the earlier part of the day, before giving over screens to more adult-appealing films, so they can prove a handy complement to a release such as Tenet.
Pixar’s Onward, which is in second place in the official UK and Ireland chart, saw box office rise 29 per cent, with takings of £185,000 from 454 cinemas. Total is now £6.66m. Onward has grossed £1.39m since cinemas started to reopen in early July – despite the fact that the film had already transitioned to digital and physical home-entertainment formats during lockdown.
One place behind Onward, Australian family animation 100 per cent Wolf saw takings rise 31 per cent at the weekend, and grossed £140,000 from 456 cinemas. Total after five weeks of play is £828,000. Given that this film is not from a major animation studio, the film is chugging along pretty successfully, and may have struggled to do any better in pre-Covid times.
Pinocchio, from Italian auteur Matteo Garone (Gamorra, Dogman) declined just 5 per cent at the weekend, with takings of £94,800 from 381 cinemas, and £557,000 after 17 days of play. Distributor Vertigo has released the film in both dubbed and subtitled versions. The UK does not have a tradition of embracing dubbed films, except in animation, whereas Pinocchio is a live-action film.
Hope Gap boosted by previews
William Nicholson’s family drama Hope Gap, adapted from his own 1999 stage play The Retreat From Moscow, offered an alternative to Tenet. Set in the southern coastal town of Seaford, East Sussex, Hope Gap stars Annette Bening, Bill Nighy and Josh O’Connor in the story of a man who visits his parents and learns that they are divorcing after 29 years of marriage. Hope Gap performed rather modestly at the weekend for distributor Curzon (£16,600 from 38 venues), but was boosted by its preview takings, including various festival outings. They push the film’s official opening number to a healthier £72,800. Including Bank Holiday Monday, that rises to just over £78,000.
Hope Gap is simultaneously available video-on-demand via Curzon Home Cinema, and was the top title on the service at the weekend, helping box office for the platform rise by 86 per cent compared to the previous weekend, and by 160 per cent compared to the equivalent weekend last year. It’s easy to draw the conclusion that the older-skewing audience for Hope Gap was happy to watch the film at home, rather than brave a cinema outing. In any case, it’s not such a crime to watch it on the TV screen at home – compared to, say, the $200m-budget Tenet.
Nicholson is best known as a screenwriter, picking up Oscar nominations for his work on Shadowlands and Gladiator. His previous feature film as director was 1997’s Firelight.
The future
After Covid struck, for many months Disney’s Mulan was set to be one of the first major cinema releases, scheduled to arrive in the UK on August 19, and with Tenet at that stage dated for August 12. While Tenet slipped back a couple of weeks to August 26, Mulan disappeared from the release calendar altogether. Now the live-action remake of the animated classic will bypass cinemas and instead launch on Disney+ this Friday (September 4). Subscribers will pay £19.99 to watch it – making this an expensive piece of content when compared to a streamer subscription, but cheaper than a family’s visit to the cinema.
Disney does, however, have a cinema release this week: The New Mutants, which it acquired when it bought Twentieth Century Fox. The film has had a rather troubled history, completing its shoot in September 2017. Reshoots were mooted, but then abandoned. The New Mutants played previews over the weekend in UK and Ireland, and the box office generated will be added in when numbers are declared next week.
Also in cinemas is French director Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables, which is not related to the famous stage musical or the Victor Hugo novel – save for its setting in the working-class Paris suburb of Monterfermeil, which is where Hugo wrote his book, and where it’s partially set. The contemporary urban drama – depicting three policemen trying to retrieve video drone evidence that incriminates them – premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019, and picked up an Oscar nomination earlier this year for International Film.
Top 10 Films August 28-30
Tenet, £5,335,654 from 611 sites (new)
Onward, £185,028 from 454 sites. Total: £6,657,744 (26 weeks)
100% Wolf, £140,050 from 456 sites. Total: £828,469 (5 weeks)
Unhinged, £112,465 from 414 sites. Total: £1,218,908 (5 weeks)
Pinocchio, £94,821 from 381 sites. Total: £556,701 (3 weeks)
Trolls World Tour £77,536 from 265 sites. Total: £655,604 (21 weeks)
Hope Gap, £72,769 from 38 sites (new)
Bring the Soul: The Movie, £39,085 from 214 sites. Total: £682,541 (57 weeks)
Dreambuilders, £24,755 from 131 sites. Total: £321,609 (7 weeks)
Dirty Dancing (30th Anniversary), £17,644 from 67 sites. Total: £439,188 (2017 release)
Other openers
Away, £5,393 from 52 sites
Love You Forever, £1,901 from 21 sites
Thanks to Comscore [@cSMoviesUK].
All figures relate to takings in UK and Ireland cinemas.
