Thursday previewz

Challengers $1.9m
Unsung Hero - $1.67m

These include pre-Thursday previews.

Boy Kills World - 500k

Challengers budget is higher than I thought (50 mil) so this might only be ok for it.

6.2m for Challengers

Not awful but not great for Challengers. Will need to do very well overseas to break even.

That would normally be great for this type of movie, but the budgest is higher than it ought to be and there's no guarantee of legs outside of oscar season.

April 2024: what went wrong? :-/

Yeah I think 20m+ would have been very good. At least it seems a lot of people are opting to see it in premium screens, I saw it in Dolby which was very much worth it hearing the score blasting through the whole auditorium.

I don't get why all the articles are calling this a romcom lol

The international performance looks pretty weak (9 mil), not a surprise to me going by the Barrabas rule

-57% Monday is solid for Challengers when everything else was in high 60s or low 70s

Challengers will do 50m+ which would be great if it wasn’t for its budget.

Anyone know if it was always intended for theatrical or was it at one point supposed to go direct to Amazon?

Streamers (besides netflix) seem to have learned that movies will have more prestige after a theatrical release even if they underperform (like Air or Napoleon). One of these companies needs a huge hit though or they'll probably just make lower budget movies (like Saltburn) and put all their money into shows.

If it was intended for streaming, then any theatrical profit is just gravy. And it will look much more like a success, just like how KOTFM and Napoleon technically lost money if they were conceived for theatrical. But since they were both originally supposed to go straight to Apple, the theatrical money is just extra.

I didn’t know it was an Amazon release. Bringing Zendaya fan Gen Z-ers to it is probably worth it.

The what now?

$15M is ok. This was sold on Zendaya, showing she's not a big draw yet, but not totally irrelevant either. The budget being so high was stupid.

You've pointed out before (probably correctly) international audiences don't like black actresses as much

Challengers grossed $7.5M internationally this weekend (-24% from last weekend in holdover markets). Overseas total at $22.8M, global total at $52.2M.

If Zendaya pulls this to $100M global feels like it'd be good overall. Seems like she's got a big career ahead of her

Yes, I do think audiences in Asia, Eastern Europe, Middle East, Latin America are unapologetically racist to an extent don't really want to watch black actors, and there is a relationship between black leads and lower international box office, even in genres that traditionally do well globally. Look at Jordan Peele's high concept horror fantasy films vs. M Night Shyamalan's, the difference in overseas grosses is staggering. Even Nope, a sci-fi alien abduction movie that typically does well globally. The Little Mermaid came in shockingly low compared to similar Disney Princess adaptations despite a healthy domestic gross (the US obviously having a significant black population that also punch above their weight when it comes to consuming entertainment). A Wrinkle in Time is maybe the biggest overseas bomb out of any major fantasy movie (it only made $10M more than The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising despite a decade of inflation and vastly higher budget). Haunted Mansion bombed hard. The original did well but it had Eddie Murphy who audiences globally did embrace, same with Will Smith, but Hollywood has not produced a single truly bankable black star ever since those two. To find a truly internationally successful movie with black leads in recent times you either have to go to Marvel, or Will Smith movies, there's literally nothing else other than Django Unchained but that obviously had Tarantino and Leo in it.

I disagree with Zendaya/Challengers though, it's actually doing about on par with its domestic performance which seems to indicate the problem may be the movie itself. But Zendaya is also not black black if you know what I mean. She could pass as ambiguous Latina. I think it's very telling that when the industry finally chooses to give a black woman a big push as a leading lady it's someone who looks like this:



Lupita is vastly more talented and had an Oscar and yet it took her forever to book a true lead role in a film with potential (Us) and it came from a black director. And then it took her another five years to book another high profile lead role. A Quiet Place: Day One will be an interesting case study.

It's possible it's just cancelled out by a homoerotic tennis movie fitting European audiences