October 9, 2005

Serenity Fans Won’t Be Pleased about This (10-day Box Office Results)

Filed under: General — TBlumer @ 1:32 pm

This has to be disappointing to Universal, Joss Whedon, and the cast of Serenity:

  • The film’s first full-week take (Sept. 30 - Oct. 6) was $12.67 million.
  • The estimate actual for Friday, October 7 is $1.48 million, a drop of over 60% from opening night (Friday, Sept. 30). That’s good for only 10th place in what to me looks like a very weak movie lineup.
  • The estimate for weekend of 10/7-10/9 is $4.93 million, a drop of over 50% from the previous weekend, good for only 9th place.

This tells me that the Firefly fans have all seen it, and there’s very little general audience left. Ouch.

At this rate, the film may get pulled in two weeks, and Universal may not recover their reported cost of $39 million (which I suspect is significantly higher than their true out-of-pocket cost) until the DVD gets released–if then.

On the plus side, at least one blogger has become a fully converted Browncoat.

I don’t think this negates the positive results of the Blogger Sneak Preview–I think it shows that the film was going to have a tough time from the get-go. The Blogger Sneak probably enhanced what looked to be, in hindsight, a box-office performance that was destined to be mediocre. It’s too bad; I thought the movie was great, and so did a lot of others.

2 Comments

  1. I had never even heard of Firefly and I didn’t see any advance marketing for the movie at all. At least none that I remember. I suspect I’m like many others and had absolutely no interest in seeing it, at all.

    I should have marketed to if they wanted to have me buy into the movie’s concept.

    Comment by Dan Sherman — October 9, 2005 @ 6:32 pm

  2. I haven’t noticed any other effort to reach non-Firefly or non-Scifi fans either. I, like you, don’t understand that.

    Comment by Tom Blumer — October 9, 2005 @ 8:25 pm

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