I’m sure it will be number one. Hopefully it opens to good numbers.
I’m sort of scared that Brave will open at #2, with that dumb Abraham Lincoln movie taking the #1 spot.
Hopefully I’m wrong.
Don’t worry. I’m sure Brave is going to at least make 60M this weekend since the Pixar films usually cross that amount. We shall find out on Monday. As for critic reviews so far, I think something “screwy” is kind of going on.
Since the film seems to be performing on a similar level to Wall-E, I’m going to estimate 230 domestic overall.
Since Wall•E opened almost the same weekend in June and is tracking about the same, yeah, the two estimates just over $200M are best guesses. It pumped $68M on the first 3 days and added $34M last weekend to end up around $132M in 10 days, (Edit: and now is $154M in 2 full weeks). It would seem to be a cakewalk to keep up with Wall-E and a host of other Pixar films released during the summer. Brave slipped to #3 on Friday, but has recovered to #2 since, still doing strong, but expect it to take a dive in the next two weeks! It seems to be holding up against the new male stripper movie by a nose.
The problem is all the competition coming in the next few weeks. It could take the wind out of Brave’s sails. Remember what happened to last year’s Cars2, a huge falloff around the 4th of July. The despicable reason for this problem is a switch last fall of DW’s Madagascar3 to only one week away from Pixar’s movie, so Pixar had to leap frog it to be two weekends distant: essential in the animation business! It’s now very close to the 4th of July, a big holiday weekend, except this year it falls on a Wednesday. Tonite at midnite, Amazing Spidey opens, and the next weekend, July 13th, so does Ice Age 4, another animation treat. The first of which has a very big promo buildup. RT gives IA4 a lousy 53% rating so far, but remember that Brave was down to 64% early on, and 20 reviews is a bit low. IA4 has been doing spectacularly well overseas, as did IA3. Our audiences are a bit more sophisticated over here, and they may remember how awful IA3 was in the last half of the film.
International. It doesn’t premiere in England until Aug. 17th. It’s out only in Australia and Russia and a few other 3rd tier countries. Doing well in Ruskeland with $5M in 10 days, as Pixar movies don’t usually do well there. But in the Land Down Under it has taken in only $7M, which is trailing Wall-E and well behind Up.
Edit: add $20M some for the 3rd weekend out. Holding at #3 and up to $174M.
Further Edit: ranks #4 after 4 weeks and falls only 43% with certified staying power! Will cross the $200M line by midweek. What makes this result very special is that IA4 did not knock the wind out of our movie’s ticket sales, of which there was a real danger of happening. That movie did only 2/3 as well, as people may be tiring of the franchise, especially after the last installment’s difficult rewatchability. Its TM rating has fallen to 40%, but as predicted, the overseas turkeys are gobbling it up.
Well, Brave crossed $200M on Wednesday, domestically. But we don’t know about any further accumulation due to an industry wide moratorium on box office results with the slaughter in Aurora, Colorado at the midnite showing of Batman. This was waiting to happen, either gunmen or a lone loser or a sarin gas attack or bomb in a left behind backpack, probably one of those. The terrorist attack on a Russian theater years ago showed just how juicy theaters are for such people. And 9-11 didn’t help. They have had 2 security people at my theater in recent weeks, not just one.
They will announce weekend results on Monday, for publication on Tuesday in the trades, sooner for the online world. It was very noticeable for me on Friday nite that something was up with boxofficemojo.com, the major web site for studio results, along with all the industry trade mag sites. I suppose this thread is a good one to occasionally report the staggered overseas box for Brave, especially with releases and reaction in Britain, Europe and Japan.
News Flash!!! Just in case you didn’t hear, there is some sort of unofficial announcement about Finding Nemo 2, and you can go to that subforum to hear all the few juicy details about the leak/rumor. I would suppose they should have reported this just before September 14th, in conjunction with the release of the 3-D version of Finding Nemo. It didn’t make any sense for the info to come out 7 weeks before the release. Too bad about leaks, they really are annoying.
In Japan, the first two day totals for Saturday and Sunday, July 21st and 22nd are ￥１４７，８０６，８００ ticket sales and 106,271 tickets sold*. These are the lowest figures for a Pixar film ever in Japan. It’s ranked #5 and two other animation films are better than it. Brave/Merida film first day satisfaction rating was 89.6**.
*最新映画ランキング - 国内映画｜MOVIE WALKER PRESS
**http://admin.eigaseikatu.com/ranking/firstday/
Tweets are blaming the Japanese voice for Merida. The tweets don’t say why. Her name is Yuko Oshima. She’s from the popular AKB48 singing group from Japan.
Edited to show my sources.
$2 million take? Brave did 3 times that here in the U.S. on its 5th week against massive competition: Spider Man, Batman, Ice Age 4 and Madagascar 3. It has dropped to 5th place here and secured $208M, plus $70M overseas. [Edit] Well, boxofficemojo.com says $2M also, amazing! Is this a limited release in Japan? [Further Edit]: up to $5M in Japan. Perhaps the anti-conformity message in Brave is a bit too much for consensus-driven Japan, unstated but presumed in all those tweets…
Btw, I finally saw IA4 last nite, and it was dreadful, certainly deserves the rotten 39% TM rating. Even Scrat and new critters can’t save it. I wonder if Blue Sky is under some sort of contract with Fox that has forced it to milk the $$ tree, which has done immensely well overseas, and IA3 produced at the time, the 3rd best showing overseas of all films up to that date. This latest film is so bad, people were leaving halfway thru, maybe got their money back.
In Russia Brave has made $15M so far, far better than most Pixar films ever do, and $14M in Australia, which is a bit slack for that place.
Big overseas release schedule for Brave in the last few weeks: most of S.America and half of Europe. It did quite well in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, all big markets. In France it’s been doing ok. Germany, as usual, was lackluster (a third of the take in France) as have all recent Pixar releases. What is wrong with that country? In Spain, 592 screens opened the movie, but receipts were slow. Britain: it doesn’t open here fully until August 17th, but has been in limited release with 140 screens for the past two weeks and is doing ok with those. Japan: still limping along embarrassingly. So Brave is doing well in about 2/3 of markets.
I’m sure many of you of Scottish / English / Irish heritage have been wondering what the reaction would be back over there. There were 3 interesting reviews from the Guardian, two were lackluster and one was good.
guardian.co.uk/film/2012/aug/09/brave-review
guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jun … -ben-child
guardian.co.uk/film/shortcut … -lost-plot
So this is what the British people have been reading over the past few days in anticipation of the wide release on Aug 17th.
Edit: wide release result in Britain: 1st place, barely, with $8.1M to add to the $3.4M with limited release. Prediction there is it will end up about where Wall•E did, about $30M or so. I would say the reviews have really hurt. The French, Germans and Low Countries went wild over Ratatouille, so somehow the characterizations or story was a bit underwhelming. Brave has done over $20M in Australia and N.Z… Britain and Japan are usually far and away the 2nd and 3rd biggest markets for Pixar films, but these countries won’t be boosting revenues for this film much.
queen_of_painting with her $210+$350M=$560M estimate seems to be the best guess so far, an assumption that the film wouldn’t do as well as most Pixar movies, either domestically or overseas.
Edit August 30: passing $230M domestic and up to $212M overseas and moving robustly.