Sunday, April 04, 2010

The Three Dee Derby Beyond the Seas

Foreign box office continues to rattle right along, much of that rattle coming from Three Dimensions:

... "[Clash of the] Titans" took over Disney's "Alice in Wonderland" in 3D, which spent a month as the No. 1 foreign title after 20th Century Fox's "Avatar" dominated for the year's first eight rounds.

"Alice" drew $34.2 million from 8,443 spots in 51 markets, and ranks No. 3 on the weekend. "Avatar" finished out of the top five with $4.6 million generated from 2,300 screens in 37 markets for a foreign gross total of $1.959 billion.

Easter weekend action for "Titans," which stars Sam Worthington, Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes, claimed the No. 1 spot in each market played ...

... The weekend's No. 2 film, DreamWorks Animation's "How to Train Your Dragon," opened in 19 territories, and garnered an animated $38.5 million overall from 7,658 locations in 54 markets.

Nearly 70% of the tally derived from some 3,477 3D venues. "Dragon's" best openers were in the U.K ($7.8 million from 716 sites, with 76% of revenues coming from 3D locations) and France, where it grabbed $4.7 million from 743 spots. ...

Like it or not, the congloms will be making more and more features in Glorious Three Dee, and likely converting 2-D movies in the pipeline to dimensional features (the equivalent of fake stereo).

These folks can't ignore the big money to be made when audiences look at their product through polarized goggles. And they won't.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dragon made less than half of Tyler Perry's new movie, even though Dragon was in twice as many theaters.

That doesn't bode well.

Anonymous said...

You may want to check those figures again...

Steve Hulett said...

That doesn't bode well.

Dragon made $10,789 its first weekend (under the p/s of Tyler's new flick.)

OTOH, it dropped a mere 33.2%. My semi-educated guesstimate is HTTYD ends with a multiple between 4 and 5 of its opening weekend number, which will put it in the $160-$170 million range.

Obviously the final domestic number may vary.

Anonymous said...

Those figures are close to correct.

THEATERS (not screens, which BOMOJO doesn't present---but it would only HURT Dragon, as it's probably playing at more SCREENS than THEATERS than Perry's film)

in 2,155 Theaters, Perry's film averaged $13,991

Dragon, in 4060 Theaters, averaged $7,192
(I did hear at one point that Dragon was on about 6000 screens. The average would be even less. I doubt Perry's movie is playing at more than one screen a theater).

Anonymous said...

Perry's movies have their own niche audience that gives them a sudden "burst" on day one, while the rest of us normal folks were barely aware it opened...And then everyone in the industry is so surprised, they headline Perry like the next "unknown trend", until he sinks back into the background again.
Just a seasonal anomaly, folks, nothing to see here.

As for Clash, it was expected, but the issue of just how bad Warner's 3-D conversions are starting to look has begun to hit the industry press.
Saturate the market with anything, and you create "elitists" among the fans, who praise native 3-D and wouldn't be caught dead at those peasant conversions...

Steve Hulett said...

A well-known film critic told a close friend of mine that Titans 3-D conversion was "awful."

A colleague here at the office said that Titans 3-D conversion was "really bad and muddy looking."

How long will this picture play with reactions like that? Not overly long, I'm thinking. And I'll bet the picture drops more than 50%, week-end to week-end.

(Dragon's 3-D, by way of contrast, is quite good.)

Anonymous said...

A well-known film critic told a close friend of mine that Titans 3-D conversion was "awful."
A colleague here at the office said that Titans 3-D conversion was "really bad and muddy looking."


Haven't seen Clash, but I've seen the 3D-conversion trailer to Warner's "Legend of the Guardians" two or three times now, and that one's certainly 90's-ViewMaster bad.

One of the press articles pointed out that there's no one company doing the conversions for all the studios--So we're probably going to see Disney's conversions look better than Warner's, but that's relative.

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