The winner 1: Disney
On only three occasions this year has a studio occupied the top two spots in the UK box-office chart. Universal managed it in June, and again earlier this month. Now it’s Disney’s turn, with Inside Out and Ant-Man delivering a one-two for the studio. Both hits are the result of strategic acquisitions for the deep-pocketed entertainment giant: Pixar in 2006 and Marvel Entertainment in 2009.
With £7.34m without the benefit of previews, Inside Out has given Disney-Pixar one of its best UK openings, especially for a non-sequel. Brave, the last non-sequel, debuted in Scotland first, but its first full weekend of UK play grossed £2.60m plus £2.67m in previews. Before that, Up set off with £6.41m and no previews. Ratatouille, WALL-E and Cars all opened smaller than Up. The Incredibles debuted at a single cinema in November 2004, and then recorded £6.26m plus £3.49m in previews for its first weekend of wide play. A year earlier, Finding Nemo grossed £7.38m in its first weekend of wide play – slightly bigger than the Inside Out debut number, and with significantly lower ticket prices.
According to Disney, the company’s exit polls show a significant adult skew for the Inside Out audience, suggesting that the film can play strongly midweek as well as at weekends, and in showtimes that include the late evening slot – traditionally a challenge for family films. Ant-Man fell a relatively slim 37% in its second session, although it’s worth bearing in mind that rain on Friday and Sunday proved a boon to cinemagoing overall. Jurassic World fell only 12% from the previous frame, for example, and Minions 16%. Over the whole seven days, Ant-Man added a robust £5.61m, for a 10-day tally of £9.62m.
The impact of rain can be seen in daily fluctuations of individual films’ grosses. Inside Out, for example was strongest on Friday and Sunday, and weaker on Saturday, when sun returned to much of the UK. In general, films performed best of all on Sunday. Usually, Saturday is the strongest day for cinemagoing in the UK.
The winner 2: Secret Cinema
Once again, Secret Cinema’s The Empire Strikes Back recorded its best-ever weekend figure, although only very marginally up on the prior frame, which was the previous record holder. Over the whole week, Secret Cinema added £410,000, of which £305,000 was achieved over the weekend period. During the summer holiday period, the challenge for the brand is to push the grosses on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday closer to weekend levels. (Secret Cinema isn’t open on Monday.) Based on performance so far, The Empire Strikes Back is headed for a £6.5m gross, a very handy addition to the film’s existing UK tally of £9.0m.
The winner 3: Amy
Despite dropping out of the top 10 chart (it’s in 11th place) and recording a fall in box-office of 24%, Asif Kapadia’s Amy proved another of the weekend’s success stories. The film shed 43% of its cinemas, meaning that its screen average went up by a healthy 33%. The Sunday performance was particularly strong. Among the film’s top 20 sites for the weekend, only four showed declines in box-office compared to the previous frame, and many are positively surging. Including Monday takings, Amy has now overtaken Touching the Void (£2.64m) to become the fifth highest-grossing non-concert documentary in the UK, behind Fahrenheit 9/11, Deep Sea 3D, March of the Penguins and Kapadia’s own Senna. With little competition currently on offer in the non-blockbuster/indie space, Amy looks set to extend its strong run for at least another week.
The solid opener: Southpaw
The reviews tended to be sniffy (the Guardian’s own Peter Bradshaw called it “hammy”, “cynical” and “increasingly dull and overwrought”) but Southpaw benefits from a highly marketable redemptive premise and credible talent elements including director Antoine Fuqua and star Jake Gyllenhaal, coming off his acclaimed turn in Nightcrawler. Currently, audience appreciation (8.1/10 at IMDb) is running far ahead of critical response (57/100 at Metacritic).
A bulked-up Gyllenhaal, battling to regain custody of his young daughter, proved a strong draw, with a robust opening of £1.66m. That compares with a debut of just over £1m including £59,000 in previews for Nightcrawler last October. Prisoners, boosted by a top-billed Hugh Jackman, kicked off with £1.37m including £38,000 previews in September 2013. Even Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which benefited from audience familiarity with the videogame source material, opened smaller (£1.37m) than Southpaw, back in 2010. For a bigger Gyllenhall opening, you’d have to go back to January 2006 and Jarhead, which began with £1.93m.
The monster: Jurassic World
For the seventh weekend in a row, Jurassic World has achieved box-office greater than £1m. (Handy comparison: Avengers: Age of Ultron grossed £341,000 in its seventh frame.) The dinosaur picture’s latest box-office addition pushes it past The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, making it now the ninth biggest film of all time in the UK, with £61.5m.
The local hit: The Legend of Barney Thomson
With a very decent £163,000 from 70 cinemas, Robert Carlyle has scored a nice directorial debut with The Legend of Barney Thomson. Distributor Icon had a clear strategy to release widely in Scotland and much more modestly in the rest of the UK. This follows the pattern of past Scottish-skewing hits including Peter Mullan’s NEDS and Ken Loach’s The Angels’ Share. (Proclaimers musical Sunshine on Leith also evidenced a Scottish skew, but was released much more aggressively across the whole UK.) Icon’s Scottish strategy began with the film’s launch on the opening night of June’s Edinburgh international film festival. It’s adapted from Douglas Lindsay’s Glasgow-set novel The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson.
Half-year report
Admissions numbers (number of tickets sold) are in for June, and they show a healthy 27% uptick on June 2014 – a month, it must be admitted, that was hampered by a relative dearth of strong titles due to a clash with the Fifa World Cup. Still, June 2015’s admissions tally is the strongest for the month for at least nine years. (The UK Cinema Association’s website doesn’t show monthly admissions prior to 2007.) Overall, admissions for the first six months of the year are 10% up on the same period in 2014, giving cinemas a very strong cushion in a year that appears to have a back-loaded release calendar with Spectre and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. So far, 2015 has already delivered two films – Jurassic World and Avengers: Age of Ultron – that are bigger than anything released in 2014, and Minions looks on target to provide a third. Add in Spectre and The Force Awakens, and that’s very likely five 2015 releases generating bigger grosses than 2014’s top hit (The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, with £41.3m).
The future
Thanks to the arrival of Inside Out and relatively strong holds from existing titles, takings are a decent 26% up on the previous frame and a tidy 72% up on the equivalent frame from 2014, when Dawn of the Planet of the Apes retained the top spot, ahead of new entrants Hercules and The Purge: Anarchy. For the coming session, cinema bookers have their hopes pinned on Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, which has already earned rave reviews in the trade press. Tracking reports, however, suggest audience interest in the Mission: Impossible franchise has dipped now that it’s reached the fifth entry, 19 years after the original. Competition is offered by Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara in action comedy Hot Pursuit, which earned a rather soft $34.6m in the US. Also in the mix: Adam Sandler in The Cobbler; Belgian horror Cub; and family film Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder.
Top 10 films July 24-26
1. Inside Out, £7,376,513 from 608 sites (new)
2. Ant-Man, £2,520,129 from 569 sites. Total: £9,616,486
3. Minions, £2,268,007 from 580 sites. Total: £37,097,156
4. Southpaw, £1,662,296 from 401 sites (new)
5. Jurassic World, £1,004,125 from 445 sites. Total: £61,500,833
6. Ted 2, £729,103 from 443 sites. Total: £8,754,916
7. Terminator: Genisys, £490,889 from 366 sites. Total: £10,373,878
8. Bajrangi Bhaijaan, £407,634 from 87 sites. Total: £1,712,161
9. Secret Cinema: The Empire Strikes Back, £304,900 from 1 site. Total: £3,009,465
10. Magic Mike XXL, £276,204 from 284 sites. Total: £6,333,013
Other openers
The Legend of Barney Thomson, £163,395 from 70 sites
Eden, £49,211 from 49 sites
Maggie, £47,002 from 89 sites
Wrong No, £16,428 from 14 sites
Best of Enemies, £7,295 from 6 sites
You’re Ugly Too, £4,381 from 6 sites (Ireland only)
Promise Dad, £489 from 8 sites
Ruth & Alex, £391 from 1 site
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