The film cost at least $250-M to produce after incentives and rebates, so will need to do sizable business at the global box office, or $900-M+ by a few estimates.
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The newest James Bond movie, “Spectre”, rocked the weekend’s box office with approximately $73 million from 3929 theaters, becoming the second biggest Bond debut of all time. The 24th film in the 53-year old series stars cost a reported $250 million to create and Daniel Craig as the secret agent that is dapper. That’s the second-best opening ever for a Bond film, following Skyfall’s $88.3 million debut in 2012.
China, where “Skyfall” took in US$59.2 million, could be the difference maker. It was a very different scenario.
Distributor Sony, who co-produced the film with Eon Productions and MGM, had predicted an opening in the $60 million range.
Having grown up watching Daniel Craig as James Bond on screen, it was dream come true for Lea Seydoux to star opposite the “intense” actor in “Spectre”, the latest film in the 007 franchise.
But perhaps he might change his mind when he sees the box office receipts, after Spectre opened with a whopping $73million weekend in North America.
Taking second place at the Box Office was The Peanuts Movie, which took $45 million. In last week’s recap I suggested that it would finish with $65 million, while The Peanuts Movie would make around $50 million. “It took Bond and Brown to get the box office back on track”.
The 3-D computer animated Peanuts marked a strong return for the beloved comic strip characters, who hadn’t appeared on the big screen since Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown underperformed in 1980.
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Even well-marketed, highly-anticipated films like “Spectre” and “The Peanuts Movie” can draw only so big an audience if they’re flawed in execution. The relatively grounded, emotionally complex, and narratively connected approach to Craig’s Bond movies brought the franchise in tune with today’s blockbuster cinema, like The Hunger Games trilogy, the Dark Knight trilogy, and the Marvel Studios superhero movies. Not only that, but The Martian and Goosebumps both held their audiences. They included Spotlight, about the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, which took $302,276 (£200,700). The good news is that among the remaining theaters, it nearly doubled its PTA, which only reemphasizes the error of going as wide as this did.
