Universal claims UK box-office record as Amy Winehouse doc stuns in week two

The winner 1: Universal

For the first time in the era of modern box-office reporting, a studio has taken the top three places in the chart. Universal achieved this feat at the weekend, with Minions, Ted 2 and Jurassic World.

The achievement continues a year of firsts for Universal. It is already the first studio to score four films with openings above £10m (Fifty Shades of Grey, Fast & Furious 7, Jurassic World, Minions) in a calendar year. Previously, no studio had managed as many as three. And when Minions passes £30m – it’s already at £27.62m – Universal will be the first studio to deliver four films at that level in a calendar year. (Disney previously managed three £30m hits in 2013, with Iron Man 3, Monsters University and Frozen, although Frozen had yet to pass the barrier by the end of the calendar year.)

The contrast with 2014 is particularly stark. Last year, Universal failed to deliver any of the 10 biggest box-office performers, with its best effort, The Wolf of Wall Street (£22.7m), landing in 11th place for the year. Bad Neighbours delivered £16.0m, and Mrs Brown’s Boys: D’Movie managed £14.7m. Already in 2015, Universal has achieved four bigger hits than The Wolf of Wall Street, with Jurassic World (£57.1m so far), Fast & Furious 7 (£38.5m), Fifty Shades of Grey (£35.0m) and Minions (£27.6m). On top of that, Pitch Perfect 2 has added a nifty £17.4m, while The Theory of Everything delivered £21.5m. Together, these six titles have produced box-office just shy of £200m.

The overall success has provided handy camouflage for Ted 2, which opened with £2.65m plus previews of £1.21m. That compares disappointingly with the original Ted movie’s debut of £5.93m plus previews of £3.40m in August 2012. Since box-office for sequels is usually relatively front-loaded, Ted 2 should decay at a faster rate, and might not get far beyond £10m over the course of its lifetime, compared to a final tally of £30.4m for Ted.

With £57.2m so far, Jurassic World is now the 11th biggest hit of all time at the UK box office, elbowing aside The Dark Knight Rises (£56.3m). Next in its sights is The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, with £57.6m. (Both these earlier films achieved their totals with tickets priced lower than they are today.)

Now at £27.6m, Minions is slightly ahead of Despicable Me 2 (£27.1m) at the same stage of its run, after three weekends of play. However, Minions is showing more consistency in its performance: third-weekend takings of £4.15m compare favourably with £2.22m for Despicable Me 2 in its third session. Consequently, Minions looks on course to exceed Despicable Me 2’s final tally of £47.5m. Pixar’s Inside Out, arriving 24 July, is the only fly in the ointment.

The winner 2: Amy

Increasing by 5% from its opening frame, Asif Kapadia documentary Amy has delivered stunning second-weekend takings of £417,000 for a 10-day total of £1.31m. Helping that rise in box-office for the Amy Winehouse film was an expansion from an initial 133 cinemas to 214 venues. Amy’s total earns it seventh place in the all-time chart for non-concert film documentaries, behind Fahrenheit 9/11, March of the Penguins, Kapadia’s own Senna, Touching the Void, Bowling for Columbine and TT3D: Closer to the Edge. In fact, adding in Monday’s takings, Amy had already overtaken the TT3D film.

Amy’s success is not confined to the weekend. The film earned £350,000 from Monday to Thursday last week, not far behind the £396,000 achieved over the opening Friday-to-Sunday period. Amy expands to about 270 cinemas from this Friday. Matching Senna’s £3.17m no longer looks such an outlandish prospect for the film.

The midweek achiever: Magic Mike XXL

With a second-weekend decline of 37%, Magic Mike XXL is showing reasonable traction in the marketplace, and has now delivered takings just shy of £4m. But it’s the film’s midweek performance that commands attention. The film opened with £1.58m including previews, and just took another £955,000 at the weekend. That means that it managed £1.47m during Monday to Thursday last week. This should not be so surprising. Weekend cinemagoing tends to be more a date-night activity. Friendship pairs and groups skew more towards weekdays. With its strong female skew, very evident in the marketing imagery, Magic Mike XXL always had its sights set on the buoyant “girls’ night out” audience, which tends to come to the fore midweek.

The disappointment: Love & Mercy

Considering the warm reception for Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy – a 7.9/10 user rating at IMDb and an 80/100 MetaCritic score – decent box-office might have been anticipated. So the opening salvo of £106,000 from 125 cinemas seems lacklustre. The challenge for distributor Sony is that Love & Mercy doesn’t quite qualify as properly mainstream, given a cast led by John Cusack, Paul Dano, Elizabeth Banks and Paul Giamatti, but the conversation in the specialised market is currently dominated by Amy.

Irish animation Song of the Sea is another film that delivered a rather anaemic screen average, with takings of £72,000 from 103 cinemas, including previews of £14,600. It’s hard to decide if this is serving the family audience or the arthouse audience – but then the same might be said of films from Japan’s Studio Ghibli, several of which have achieved decent numbers in the UK for Song of the Sea distributor StudioCanal.

The future

Due to the relative lack of commercially potent new releases, takings are 14% down on the previous weekend. They are also 41% down on the equivalent session from a year ago, although that weekend tally was boosted by more than £8m in preview takings for Transformers: Age of Extinction, earned from an additional six days of play, as well as £4.86m in previews for How to Train Your Dragon 2. Strip all the previews out from the current session and the year-ago equivalent, and the latest weekend is well ahead.

Cinema bookers now have their hopes pinned on Ant-Man, from the Marvel stable. The premise – a superhero the size of an insect – might initially have seemed bizarre, even by the standards of the comic-book genre, and buzz worsened with the exit of original director Edgar Wright. Commercial expectations have brightened recently, ever since Disney started screening the film. Ant-Man is joined this weekend by Tarsem Singh’s latest effort Self/Less, starring Ryan Reynolds, James Franco and Jonah Hill in true story True Story, and horror The Gallows. Arthouse alternatives include 13 Minutes, from Downfall director Oliver Hirschbiegel.

Top 10 films, 10-12 July

1. Minions, £4,154,359 from 605 sites. Total: £27,623,294

2. Ted 2, £3,867,723 from 549 sites (new)

3. Jurassic World, £1,853,867 from 546 sites. Total: £57,158,664

4. Terminator: Genisys, £1,670,491 from 542 sites. Total: £7,313,858

5. Magic Mike XXL, £954,766 from 485 sites. Total: £3,998,010

6. Amy, £416,627 from 214 sites. Total: £1,310,432

7. Secret Cinema: The Empire Strikes Back, £287,225 from one site. Total: £2,187,290

8. Spy, £176,401 from 258 sites. Total: £9,654,086

9. Love & Mercy, £105,718 from 128 sites (new)

10. Song of the Sea, £72,172 from 103 sites (new)

Other openers

Baahubali, £32,107 from eight sites

The Choir, £21,142 from 33 sites

Touch of Evil, £12,700 from 14 sites (rerelease)

Hero – Naam Yaad Rakhi, £10,320 from 12 sites

Dear White People, £10,060 from 19 sites

P’tit Quinquin, £2,322 from eight sites

The Reunion, £1,495 from four sites

The Human Centipede 3, £938 from one site

• Thanks to Rentrak