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How
did Bridget Jones’s Baby deliver so many pounds at the UK box office?
Charles Gant | The Guardian – October 5,
2016
As
Bridget rules the UK chart for the third week, ahead of new opener Miss
Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,
we analyse the maths behind such extraordinary audience domination.
The winner: Bridget Jones’s Baby
The Bridget
Jones’s Baby success story at UK cinemas writes another chapter as
the film cracks £30m in just 17 days – the fastest pace ever set for a
romantic comedy. Of course, ticket price inflation favours this movie, but
it’s worth remarking that 2001’s original Bridget
Jones’s Diary had
yet to crack £30m after 31 days of release – eventually reaching £42m
thanks to a very long tail of cinema play. Three years later, Bridget
Jones: The Edge of Reason was
quicker out of the gate, cracking £30m after 24 days of play, on its way
to a final tally of £36m.
The romantic comedy has been rather an orphan genre in recent years, at
least in the UK and the US. British variants – 2014’s Cuban
Fury and 2015’s Man
Up – have seen such
disappointing box office that producers and financiers are hardly
encouraged to try again. The weepie Me
Before You, a £9.6m hit this year, hardly qualifies as an example of
the romcom genre, despite some comedic elements and a strong romantic
storyline. As for the US, there has really only been How to Be Single this
year, which also broke a few rules in the romcom template.
The success of Bridget Jones’s
Baby doesn’t really
yield many lessons for the film industry, since it’s a sequel featuring
a beloved character, which doesn’t help a producer shopping an original
romcom script. It does, however, encourage development executives to keep
scouring those bookshelves in the hope of discovering a new property with
equivalent potential. It’s also another reminder of the commercial
potency of the female audience, which continues to be under-served by
Hollywood.
Bridget Jones’s Baby has powered an admissions surge for the month
of September, traditionally a relatively quiet month for UK cinemas. The
monthly admissions data is always slow to be confirmed, but insiders are
saying it could well be the strongest September this century, and the
busiest since 1997, which was powered by the late-August release that year
of The
Full Monty.
Bridget Jones’s Baby (£31.35m) has now overtaken Notting
Hill (£31.01m) to
become the fourth-biggest romcom at the UK box office, behind the previous
two Bridget Jones movies and Love
Actually. These numbers are not adjusted for inflation.
The runner-up: Miss Peregrine’s
Home for Peculiar Children
Although it couldn’t budge Bridget from the top
spot, Miss
Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children opened
with a very creditable £3.36m, or £3.47m including previews. That’s a
nice recovery of commercial form for director Tim
Burton, after 2014’s Big Eyes (debut of £136,000) and 2012’s Frankenweenie (£742,000
including previews of £156,000). The last time a Burton movie opened
bigger was in 2010, with Alice
in Wonderland.
Miss Peregrine has the advantage of familiar source material (the Ransom
Riggs novel) and a family positioning – although a 12A certificate
and a peril-packed storyline might be red flags for parents of younger
children. The story’s setting is primarily in Wales and Blackpool, which
is another advantage for the UK release.
The livestream event: Supersonic
Another week, another event-style release of a music
documentary, with Sunday’s presentation of Oasis film Supersonic,
together with a livestream Q&A with director Mat
Whitecross and executive
producer Liam Gallagher. On 8 September, Nick Cave film One
More Time With Feeling went
out to 156 cinemas, with some repeat showings over the 9-11 September
weekend, grossing £343,000. A week later, it was the turn of The
Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years, which went out on 15
September to 497 cinemas, yielding £597,000 in a single day, and now
stands at a robust £926,000.
Supersonic on Sunday grossed £542,000 from 387 venues, which is a
nice chunk ahead of its regular release on Friday, when the film will
downsize to a more focused 74 cinemas. And because the Sunday screenings
are classified just as an event release, and because the regular rollout
beginning this weekend swerves the three big circuits Odeon, Vue and
Cineworld, distributor eOne is able to release Supersonic on DVD, Blu-ray and digitally within the 16.5-week
theatrical window that the major multiplex chains demand. In fact, the
home entertainment release is set for the end of this month.
The under-performer: Free State of
Jones
When STX Entertainment and IM Global greenlit the
$50m-budget American civil war drama Free State of Jones, starring Matthew McConaughey, hopes were high
for a major prestige film with awards potential and commercial heft. But
the US release in June, delivering just $21m at the box office, put paid
to that.
For
the UK, American civil war dramas are a tricky sell at the best of times,
and distributor StudioCanal really needed some US buzz to give the film
liftoff. Absent that, Free State of Jones represented a
distribution challenge, despite some admiring reviews including from the
Guardian’s
Peter Bradshaw. The UK debut of £119,000 from 226 cinemas might be
labelled a disappointment, but expectations had already been shifted
significantly downwards.
The personal best: Hell or High
Water
In 2014, when Starred Up grossed
£1.5m in UK cinemas, the film represented director David
Mackenzie’s biggest ever box office here and his first £1m hit. Over
the seven previous feature films, commercial returns for the director had
been distinctly patchy. Now Hell or
High Water has reached £1.62m, overtaking Starred
Up to become Mackenzie’s new best achiever. The film grossed £52,000
at the weekend, and there’s probably another £150-200,000 left in it
yet, as it mops up the smaller indie venues.
The future
Buoyed up by the strong hold of Bridget Jones’s Baby,
takings at the weekend were overall 11% up on the previous frame, and also
15% up on the equivalent session from 2015, when The
Martian arrived at the
top spot. Box office has now been up on the equivalent 2015 weekends for
nine of the past 10 frames. Hopes are high that this trend will continue
with the arrival today (5 October) of The Girl on the Train, adapted from the Paula Hawkins bestseller.
Rival distributors are running scared of the eOne release this weekend,
although Warners offers Mel Gibson actioner Blood
Father and Icon
presents darkly comic US indie War on Everyone, from John Michael McDonagh (The Guard, Calvary).
Alternatives include US horror comedy The
Greasy Strangler, the regular release of Supersonic, as mentioned
above, and Louis Theroux’s first theatrical feature My Scientology Movie. The
13th, the documentary from Selma director Ava DuVernay about US mass
incarceration of African Americans, appears simultaneously in cinemas and
on Netflix, following festival showcases in New York and London.
Top 10 films September 30 to 2 October
1. Bridget
Jones’s Baby, £4,807,165 from 645 sites. Total: £31,350,360
2. Miss
Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, £3,473,781 from 558 sites (new)
3. Deepwater
Horizon, £1,984,340 from 487 sites (new)
4. The
Magnificent Seven, £1,004,373 from 540 sites. Total: £4,354,269
5. Supersonic,
£542,263 from 387 sites (new, Sunday only)
6. Finding
Dory, £365,921 from 478 sites. Total: £41,720,627
7. Kubo
and the Two Strings, £320,781 from 486 sites. Total: £2,730,717
8. Don’t
Breathe, £220,900 from 220 sites. Total: £3,356,184
9. Bad
Moms, £178,511 from 203 sites. Total: £7,977,387
10. MS
Dhoni – The Untold Story, £177,441 from 79 sites (new)
Other openers
Free State of Jones, £118,886 from 226 sites
Swiss Army Man, £80,403 from 59 sites
The First Monday in May, £31,846 from 15 sites
LORD (Legend of Ravaging Dynasties), £28,147 from 16 sites
Nikka Zaildar, £27,623 from 12 sites
Under the Shadow, £24,392 from 25 sites
Southside with You, £6,184 from 27 sites
The Fencer, £4,202 from six sites
Courted, £2,883 from eight sites
Aandavan Kattalai, £1,908 from one site
Kickboxer, £1,132 from 10 sites
Urban Hymn, £859 from eight sites
Tharlo, £699 from three sites
Amanda Knox, £306 from one site
Thanks to comScore. All figures relate to takings in UK and Ireland
cinemas.
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