'The Lion King'
Walt DisneyPrior the 2009 J.J. Abrams-directed reboot, the biggest opening weekend for a Star Trek movie was the pre-Thanksgiving 1996 launch of Star Trek: First Contact. Buoyed by strong reviews, an usual PG-13 rating that promised a darker and more violent action melodrama and a campaign that successfully sold the flick as a combo of the two most popular Trek flicks (The Wrath of Khan and The Voyage Home), the film opened with a whopping $30 million and legged it to $90 million domestic. Just two months later, a re-release of the first Star Wars movie, celebrating its 20th anniversary, opened with $35 million in January of 1997.
The Star Wars: Special Edition debut was impressive for any number of reasons, not least of which because the old Star Wars snagged a bigger opening weekend than the biggest debut for any "new" Star Trek movie. If there was any doubt that Star Wars was still a viable IP ripe for the plundering, the "Special Edition" reissues of the Star Wars trilogy earned $471 million worldwide in early 1997. George Lucas' long-fabled prequel flicks began dropping two years later. Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith eventually earned (sans reissues) $2.425 billion combined on a total production spend of $345 million.
Flash forward to September of 2011, when Walt Disney gave The Lion King a 3-D conversion and re-released it into theaters. Despite the 1994 animated blockbuster having sold 32 million VHS tapes since 1995 and 11.9 million DVDs since 2003, The Lion King 3-D opened with $30 million on its opening weekend. It earned $94 million domestic and $91.3 million overseas and was the third-biggest movie of the season behind Paranormal Activity 3 and Puss in Boots. The Lion King 3-D's success led to a mini-surge in Disney animated theatrical re-releases, but none of them (Beauty and the Beast, Finding Nemo and Monsters, Inc. in 2012) matched The Lion King's success.
Whatever a massive debut for a reanimated remake of The Lion King means in a macro sense, the micro of it is that folks just really like watching The Lion King in theaters. The mixed-negative reviews that argued that this Jon Favreau-directed version was essentially a re-painted and buttoned down version of the same movie you saw in 1994 and then bought in 1995, weren't so much pans as reassurances. This is a slightly new version of The Lion King, with a new cast comprised of the likes of Donald Glover, Beyonce Knowles-Carter and Seth Rogen, complete with James Earl Jones reprising his role as Mufasa. But it was still The Lion King.
Just as the 1997 "Special Edition" reissues of Star Wars underlined the potential value of "new" Star Wars content, so too did the 2011 3-D reissue of The Lion King highlight the potential encased in this specific animated IP. And once Favreau proved with The Jungle Book that you could essentially make an animated movie filled with animals and wildlife that looked "photo real," it was only a matter of time before Simba, Mufasa and Scar got the same treatment. Walt Disney's remake of The Lion King opened yesterday with a boffo $78.5 million Friday gross, including $23 million in Thursday previews. Including overseas grosses, it has already earned $270.5 million worldwide.
That $78.5 million Friday gross is Walt Disney's biggest single-day gross ever, even accounting for inflation, for anything that wasn't an MCU flick or a Star Wars movie. It's the second-biggest single-day July gross behind Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II, which opened with $92 million in 2011 but then front-loaded to $169 million, which is still (until tomorrow) the biggest opening weekend ever for the month of July. Accounting for inflation, it's fourth behind Harry Potter 7.2 and Chris Nolan's Dark Knight sequels ($67 million in 2008 and $75 million in 2012), all of which opened on this exact weekend. Will The Lion King be less frontloaded this weekend than those three blockbusters?
Legs merely as "long" as The Dark Knight (a mere 2.36x multiplier for a then-record $158 million debut weekend) gets The Lion King to $184 million, which would be (sans inflation) the biggest July launch of all time and (including inflation) Disney's second-biggest non-MCU/non-Star Wars opening weekend ever behind Johnny Depp's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest ($135 million in July of 2006/$187 million adjusted). If it legs like Pirates 2 (2.42x) or The Simpsons Movie ($74 million from a $30 million Friday in July of 2007), The Lion King will end Sunday night with $190 million. Even Dark Knight Rises/Harry Potter 7.2 legs (over/under 2x) gets it to between $145 million and $171 million.
The optimistic scenario is that this indeed plays like either a genuine animated flick or a general audiences blockbuster. An over/under 2.6x multiplier, think Austin Powers: Goldmember ($76 million from a $30 million Friday in July of 2002) or The Secret Life of Pets ($104 million/$38 million in July of 2016) gets this one over $200 million for the weekend. Conversely, a frontloaded weekend like Ant-Man and the Wasp and Spider-Man: Homecoming (both of which legged out after their debuts, natch), would give it a "mere" $177 million debut weekend. When your $200 million animated remake nabs a $78.5 million domestic Friday gross, there aren't a lot of pessimistic scenarios.
As far as the whole "What does this mean for cinema?" thing, well, I'm less annoyed at folks flocking to The Lion King (it's a new production of an old play) than I am at folks not also flocking to other stuff playing everywhere else. But The Lion King is, for good reason, an incredibly popular animated movie. Audiences seem to like this one more than critics (an A Cinemascore and an average 4.49/5 score in Rotten Tomatoes verified-user ratings). I wish we snobby film critics liked it more, but I just hope all of those families are buying lots of concessions to help subsidize the other movies playing to comparatively empty auditoriums.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2019/07/20/lion-king-beyonce-star-wars-star-trek-harry-potter-dark-knight-johnny-depp-spider-man-disney-marvel-box-office/
2019-07-20 15:00:26Z
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