Advertisement

John Hanlon Reviews

Blog

Box Office Report: “Pan” falters on takeoff

Posted in: Box Office Report  |  By: John Hanlon  |  October 14th, 2015
Hugh Jackman in Pan

With a 150 million dollar budget, order the new family film Pan failed to lift off at the box office this past weekend, order opening with a paltry 15 million dollars. With a Rotten Tomatoes score of 24%, the film was blasted by critics and unseen by audiences.

Returning champion The Martian continued to do strong business domestically and it’s now made more than 100 million dollars at the box office in the US alone (the film has made 246 million worldwide).

Here are the estimated weekend grosses of the top five films (according to BoxOfficeMojo.com):

1. The Martian— $37.0 million
2. Hotel Transylvania 2 — $20.4 million
3. Pan — $15.3 million
4. The Intern — $8.6 million
5. Sicario — $7.5 million

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the big winners at the box office and a few of the big losers.

Loser: Pan

Pan‘s failure at the box office is a reminder that the retelling of an origin story is often a tricky expedition. Early this year, Kenneth Branagh succeeded– with critics and audiences– when he brought Cinderella back to the big screen but late this summer, The Fantastic Four reboot completely fell apart.

Pan was a high risk for Warner Brothers and with such low returns, it could ultimately cost the studio 150 million. Although none of the stars here– including Hugh Jackman, Rooney Mara and Garrett Hedlund — were responsible for the box office bomb, this will likely hurt their asking price going forward.

Winner: The Martian

After opening with October’s second-highest domestic haul of all time, the film retained the top spot and managed only face a 31% decline, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com. The word-of-mouth and the critical support this film has received will definitely help it in the weeks to come.

Loser: The Walk

Sony’s The Walk is one of the best movies of the year and even has an 84% fresh rating on RottenTomatoes.com. Unfortunately though, the Robert Zemeckis film is faltering at the box office. It expanded into more than 2500 theaters domestically last weekend and only landed at seventh at the box office.

The film is opening in more theaters worldwide in the weeks to come– and the fact that Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s main character is a French tightrope walker could help in the international market– but so far, the film is coming in under expectations.

Winner: Jobs

In limited release, the new film is earning an incredible amount of money. According to BoxOfficeMojo, “The film brought in an estimated $521,000 for a per theater average of $130,236, the best for any film released in 2015 and third overall for the year behind American Sniper‘s impressive early year numbers.” Those numbers are only going higher as the film expands into more theaters next weekend and is launched nationwide on October 23rd.

Comments