The Croods conquer UK box office
Stone age story bashes Jack the Giant Slayer and Oz the Great and Powerful to take the top spot ahead of Easter weekend
The winner
After the relative disappointment of Rise of the Guardians led tosignificant job losses at DreamWorks Animation, the outcome for the company's follow-up The Croods was always bound to receive extra attention. What's more, The Croods is the first film going out internationally through new distribution partner Twentieth Century Fox, following a long association with Paramount. The result – a £5.37m UK debut including £1.85m in previews – is a happy outcome for all parties, especially when you consider that snow and bitter cold over the weekend provided one less reason to leave the house, leading to significant drops for many films already on release.
For comparison, Rise of the Guardians debuted last November with £1.97m.Madagascar 3, which benefited from an inherited audience, kicked off with £6.03m including £2.39m in previews. Ignore the previews, and the opening-weekend-only numbers for The Croods (£3.52m) and Madagascar 3 (£3.64m) aren't so far apart. Some schools broke up for Easter on Friday, and others do so this week. Either way, there is clearly a big Easter holiday audience yet to come for The Croods and the other family films in the market.
The runner-up
With a $195m pricetag, direction from Bryan Singer and an original release date of summer 2012, big things were once expected of Jack the Giant Slayer. One of the many public-domain fairytales retooled by Hollywood for broad audiences, the action adventure represented a big bet by backers Warners on the hot new blockbuster trend. Then the release date was delayed until March 2013, and anticipation fizzled: presumably Jack didn't quite have what it takes to compete with the big boys of summer.
Back when the film was in production, a UK debut of £1.59m would definitely have represented a disappointment. At this point, it's probably what the market was more or less expecting. Not really playing to the adult date-movie crowd, and with strongest appeal to families with young boys, Jack isn't quite the broad four-quadrant proposition that would deliver true blockbuster numbers.
Although Warners won't welcome the comparison, there's another film that came with a hefty pricetag, was likewise moved from summer to March, and ended up with an appeal more specific than originally envisaged: John Carter. Disney's sci-fi adventure debuted just over a year ago with £1.96m. Oz the Great and Powerful, with a total now north of £10m, makes it a trio of family films occupying the top places of the chart.
The adult alternative
Over in the US, Identity Thief proved the first release of 2013 to pass $100m, anointing Bridesmaids breakout Melissa McCarthy as a new bankable comedy star. The roadtrip film's $35m US opening would suggest a UK debut around £3.5m, although it's rare for US comedies to achieve this kind of equivalent success. Identity Thief in fact kicked off here with £1.31m, including previews of £111,000. That's ahead of previous 2013 comedy This Is 40 (£1.23m including £319,000 in previews) and behind I Give It a Year (£1.45m).
The notion that comedy is a genre where audiences are most looking for fresh faces, and quickest to tire of existing ones, is supported by comparisons with The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, starring Steve Carelland Jim Carrey. Released the previous week, the warring-magician comedy debuted with a dismal £306,000 and then fell this week by 79%, for a 10-day total of £569,000. Game over for Carell and Carrey? In fairness, the film is saddled with an unappealing title and questionable premise.
The big fallers
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone is by no means the only film seeing numbers plummeting. Teen action remake Red Dawn fell a punishing 83%, and slasher horror Maniac, which had shed the majority of its sites, plunged 93%. In this context The Paperboy, down 49%, and Welcome to the Punch, down 57%, both seem acceptable results.
The milestone
With £40.12m, Les Misérables is the first 2013 release to achieve £40m in the UK, and is one of only 35 films ever to do so. Last year four titles – Skyfall, The Dark Knight Rises, Avengers Assemble and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – exceeded the £40m benchmark, and in fact all of those films also made it past £50m. After 11 weeks on release, there is hardly any more money left on the table for Les Miserables to grab, and attention now turns to the home entertainment phase, with the DVD set for 13 May.
The specialised sector
Once again achieving the smallest decline (down 20%) of any film in the top 10, Steven Soderbergh's Side Effects continues to straddle the arthouse-mainstream divide, with takings so far of £3.40m. With the top 30 still accommodating numerous crossover titles including Arbitrage, The Paperboy, Argo, Cloud Atlas, Django Unchained, Silver Linings Playbook, Stoker and Lincoln, few pure arthouse titles are making much headway, and top foreign language film, Reality, is down in 36th place. One exception is Compliance, Craig Zobel's 2012 Sundance hit about the dire, dark consequences of a prank call to a fast-food restaurant. The film debuted with £72,400 from 35 cinemas, enough for 14th place.
The future
After the dismal result the previous weekend, takings recovered by a healthy 79%, although those number are skewed by the peculiar way box-office is counted: previews for The Croods were excluded from the tally of the previous frame, and then added to the current one. More significantly, box office is 20% ahead of the equivalent weekend from 2012, when The Hunger Games debuted at the top spot. Studios still have some major firepower left for Easter, with GI Joe: Retaliation landing on Wednesday, and Finding Nemo 3D and Stephenie Meyer adaptationThe Host arriving Friday. More sophisticated adult audiences are served by Danny Boyle's 15-certificate Trance, with niche alternatives including Good Vibrations, Francois Ozon's In the House and Penny Woolcock documentary One Mile Away.
Top 10 films
1. The Croods, £5,372,290 from 521 sites (New)
2. Jack the Giant Slayer, £1,591,736 from 467 sites (New)
3. Oz the Great and Powerful, £1,345,135 from 521 sites. Total: £10,085,578
4. Identity Thief, £1,313,162 from 440 sites (New)
5. Side Effects, £609,406 from 369 sites. Total: £3,400,378
6. Wreck-It Ralph, £236,580 from 399 sites. Total: £22,329,961
7. Stolen, £202,373 from 187 sites (New)
8. Welcome to the Punch, £194,861 from 334 sites. Total: £974,862
9. Parker, £137,027 from 174 sites. Total: £1,578,781
10. Mama, £111,739 from 170 sites. Total: £5,321,101
Other openers
Compliance, 35 sites, £72,417
Reality, 20 sites, £15,744 (+ £1,116 previews)
Post Tenebras Lux, 18 sites, £7,978 (+ £713 previews)
Rangrezz, 16 sites, £6,972 (+ £969 previews)
Pooja Kiven Aa, 7 sites, £4,746
Reincarnated, 12 sites, £4,497
The Servant, 1 site, £2,053
Neighbouring Sounds, 2 sites, £3,702 (+ £659 previews)
Small Apartments, 2 sites, £198
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