Universal’s bottom line was changed for good over the weekend, thanks to the high-flying success of Wicked: For Good — to the tune of $150 million in North American ticket sales and $226 million worldwide.
The same can’t be said for the theatrical movie business: The rest of the box office top 10 grossed just under $31.6 million combined — roughly 21 percent of what Wicked earned on its own.
So, as some industry observers might have declared “the movies are back” thanks to Wicked, Richard Rushfield has an edit: “The movie are back, because when you get below Wicked on the chart, it’s not so exciting.”
As Richard and Sean McNulty have frequently discussed this fall, the schedule has been littered with failures — from misfired ’80s IP (Tron: Ares, The Running Man) to multiple dramas made for adults that eschewed the once-typical platform release model in favor of wide bows to greatly diminished returns. The latest in this troubling trend: Searchlight Pictures’ Rental Family with Brendan Fraser, which opened to just $3.3 million from nearly 2,000 screens.
“It’s another example of what I recently wrote a column about, the difficulty releasing dramas right now. It’s getting scary,” Richard says.
“We’ve seen it a few times this fall and to not really great effect outside of Sony Pictures Classics’ Nuremberg, which is doing pretty well,” Sean McNulty adds, following the failures of other dramas like The Smashing Machine, Die My Love and Christy. “It used to be that films like Rental Family would do a platform release, and now you’re kind of just forgoing that. I’d be curious to hear their strategy on that from Searchlight.”
Still, the story of the weekend was Wicked: For Good. The musical’s opening frame was the third-biggest ever for Universal (after Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom), and the second best of the year after A Minecraft Movie. Wicked: For Good also overindexed with women, who accounted for 70 percent of ticket buyers, allowing the blockbuster to exploit a noticeable gap in the marketplace.
“Name another big-budget tentpole this year that is targeted toward women,” Richard says. “Given that women represent at least half the people in this world, you would think there would be a few of those. But I can’t seem to find another one.”
