'Ralph' Scoring 2nd Best Thanksgiving Debut With $84M+; 'Creed II' $55M+ Live-Action Champ; 'Robin Hood' Goes Wrong At $14M+
While mid-week projections for Disney's Ralph Breaks the Internet and MGM/New Line's Creed II have simmered, that doesn't mean that these movies weren't hot. With $84.5M per Disney, Ralph 2 continues to be the second-best Thanksgiving stretch opener after Disney's own Frozen ($93.5M), and also beating the studio's Moana ($82M), Toy Story 2 ($80.1M), and Coco ($72.9M). Creed II, hands downs, is the best live-action debut the autumn holiday has ever seen with $55.8M, pummeling past Disney's 2007 Enchanted (which had some animation in it, $49M five-day), 2008's Four Christmases, and 2000's Unbreakable (both $46M).
Both films, in addition to great holdovers from Warner Bros.' Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald ($42.9M), Illumination/Universal's The Grinch ($42M) and 20th Century Fox/New Regency/GK Films' Bohemian Rhapsody ($19.3M)and Paramount's Instant Family ($17.4M) drove ticket sales over the Thanksgiving five-day to a record $314M according to ComScore, beating the previous holiday high in 2013 ($294.2M), and surging ahead of last year's $270.3M by 16%. The 2018 domestic box office to date at $10.7 billion is raging 7% ahead of 2016 which ended in a U.S./Canada B.O. record of $11.4B.
The biggest disaster here for the weekend is Lionsgate's near $100M production of Robin Hood, which, at this point in time, is bound to be wounded with a $14.2M five-day take.
If you're Disney, Sony or Warner Bros. this weekend, then you're breathing a sigh of relief. Back in 2014-2015, the town got blazing drunk on the desire to develop another Robin Hood and, at one point, four versions of the classic hero were floating around town, with Disney looking at a Pirates of the Caribbean revisionist take by Brandon Barker (Nottingham & Hood), Sony in love with a pitch from Cory Goodman and Jeremy Lott, and Warner Bros. interested in Aquaman scribe Will Beall's version. Lionsgate put their production into motion the fastest, scooping up Joby Harold's script (He was one of the writers on Warners' King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, and gets an EP credit here) and rival studios backed away, which was a prudent business decision in hindsight for a couple of reasons.
First, moviegoers aren't interested in seeing the same IP from different studios, and the studio that makes it to the screen first is truly the winner, especially if they have the goods. Disney's live-action take of its classic animated title The Jungle Book with Iron Man director Jon Favreau is a hard combination to beat, and the film soaked up close to $1 billion at the global B.O. The success of that film partially created headaches for Warner Bros.' live action Jungle Book film Mowgli from director Andy Serkis, which was delayed greatly after being in production from March 2015 to Oct. 2017. Alfonso Cuaron was called in to to rescue the movie, and Warners wisely decided to forgo any negative box office press on the film by jettisoning the movie to Netflix for a streaming release
Second, rebooting dusty classics is a tricky business, with the uphill creative battle being a tug of war between familiar elements that audiences enjoy about the property, and not completely turning the IP inside out. Recent classic reboots, primed to be event films with exorbitant production costs, failed greatly, i.e. Warners' Pan ($128.3M WW, $150M production cost) and King Arthur ($148.6M WW, $175M prod. cost). The problem with Lionsgate's Robin Hood is that it's too familiar and arriving at cinemas far too soon, eight years after Ridley Scott's Russell Crowe take. That Universal movie at least kept a 19-year space from Morgan Creek's Kevin Costner film ($165.4M domestic, $390.5M WW), so that it could at least appeal to mass moviegoers (the movie opened to $36M, grossed $105.2M domestic, $321.7M global).
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