Early morning industry estimates are confirming what we saw late last night: Warner Bros./Legendary monster movie is poised to pull in between $60M-$61M after a $24M Saturday that was +19% from Friday’s $20.2M. And Warner Bros. is reporting Kong: Skull Island at $61M as well. On the high end, that’s a 35% improvement on the pic’s projections four weeks ago, and $11M higher from where we originally thought Kong would land. Imax brought in $7.6M at 382 auditorium repping 12.5% of the weekend. Eight of Kong‘s 10 top-grossing locations included Imax bookings. In total, the global opening for Kong: Skull Island stands at $142.6M which is ahead of the $135M we forecasted.
Regarding Kong‘s rebound, Jeff Goldstein, Warner Bros. domestic distribution president said, “I think the marketing sold the movie perfectly heading into the weekend. This is a great weekend for the industry overall and all of our exhibition partners. The industry is up 24% from a year ago.” In fact for the period of Jan. 1-March 12, the total domestic B.O. is at $2.18 billion according to ComScore which is flat with the same frame a year ago. That’s good news, as 2017 tickets sales have been lagging for a few weekends.
On social media, you can also feel the warmth for Kong: RelishMix reports that hashtag activity for the Jordan Vogt-Roberts-directed movie has tripled since Thursday at 5.2K unique hashtags combined across Instagram and Twitter to 17.3K on Saturday. #KongSkullIsland hashtags are at 61.4K over four weeks with 21.5K for #Kong and 17.8K for #KingKong. Social gender activity is 60.8% male and 39.1% female while age is slicing 78% over 25 and 21.7% under 25. Since the Mexico premiere, Tom Hiddleston’s Instagram popped heavily with 254K likes on March 6th.
Reviewers already knew Kong: Skull Island was a fun ride different from other Kongs, and for moviegoers to believe it they needed to see it. Kong could capitalize on another recent B.O. trend: Well-reviewed movies like Universal/Blumhouse’s Get Out and 20th Century Fox’s Logan have experienced decent first Sunday holds (both those titles dipped 22% from Saturday). Given that, there might be a chance that Kong bests what’s expected to be a -30% decline.
True, a $60M-plus No. 1 opening in March is noteworthy, and we’ve seen other movies like Divergent 1 & 2 open to $52M-plus during this month, but damn, Kong: Skull Island is bloody expensive at $185M along with an estimated global P&A of $136M putting a cloud over its profitability. And it’s that high cost that deflates the celebration of Kong‘s No. 1 win. Kong will get dinged around the world when Disney’s Beauty and the Beast opens next weekend, but WB is hoping to make good at the B.O. during that six-week play period stateside leading up to Easter when kids are rotating on spring break.
Overseas is at $81.6M in 65 markets, which is alright, though financiers have told us that $120M would have been a better start. WB/Legendary’s Godzilla after ancillaries yielded a profit off a $529M global haul. Does Kong get there? Japan and China open later this month, and despite the latter country’s Tencent Pictures being involved in Kong: Skull Island, the movie isn’t a Chinese co-production, therefore it’s subjected to the typical rental for U.S. pics that’s between 25%-27%. We deconstructed Kong: Skull Island on Friday, and aside from Logan and Get Out stealing the monkey’s money this weekend, the biggest challenge for the latest iteration of this classic Hollywood brand is King Kong himself.
By Anthony D'Alessandro
