Johnny Depp in Alice Through the Looking Glass, which flopped on the weekend. It took in US$28.1 million, according to comScore, which compiles box office data.
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In Disney’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, an all-new spectacular adventure featuring the unforgettable characters from Lewis Carroll’s beloved stories, Alice returns to the whimsical world of Underland and travels back in time to save the Mad Hatter. While Depp’s representatives have denied his estranged wife, Amber Heard’s accusations of abuse, it didn’t stop fans from threatening to boycott the film.
The latest X-Men instalment also opened well below the $90.8m debut of 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past and the $132.4m (£90.5m) opening of February’s X-Men spin-off Deadpool. This was far below expectations of a $60 million weekend and a really rough start for a film that has a budget of $170 million. The sum is far worse than the first “Alice in Wonderland” which opened with $116 million in March of 2010. Heard, who had filed for divorce, appeared in Los Angeles Superior Court on Friday with a bruise on her right cheek.
“There’s no reason to complain about an $80 million four-day weekend”, says Paul Dergarabedian, box office analyst for comScore.
Reviews of the movie, directed by James Bobin, have been pretty disastrous too, its star-studded cast including Johnny Depp, Mia Wasikowska, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen not managing to pull the film’s plot together.
It’s a rare blip for Disney, which is already crossing $4 billion in ticket sales in 2016 – a record pace buoyed by hits like “Zootopia“, “The Jungle Book” and “Captain America: Civil War”.
Disney’s distributing chief, Dave Hollis has wondered about the poor showing of “Alice” though with the film receiving critically bad reviews even before it came out, some have somewhat expected it.
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The Angry Birds Movie, in its second week, did reasonably well with a collection of $18.7 million and Captain America: Civil War continued the good run with $15.1 million in its fourth week collection. The only real success he’s had in the past several years has been in Disney’s Into the Woods, in what basically amounted to a glorified cameo. So while the global market is the last, best hope for Alice Through The Looking Glass making any money, it’ll need a huge rally in order to save the day.
