The winner
Delivering the biggest opening weekend since The Inbetweeners 2 back in early August, Gone Girl has injected some much-needed heat into the market. Debuting with £4.11m, including £416,000 in previews, the result is more or less exactly in line with the US opening of $37.5m.
Director David Fincher’s last film, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, began with £4.32m over new year weekend 2011/12, although this was in fact a seven-day figure, including grosses from Boxing Day onwards. Its actual weekend gross was £1.57m, against £3.59m for Gone Girl over the Friday-to-Sunday period. Before that, The Social Network debuted with £2.49m, including £383,000 in previews. Ignoring previews, Gone Girl has delivered the biggest ever opening for a Fincher film.
Although Hollywood has delivered blockbuster hits from young adult novels such as Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games, and has produced big numbers from beloved classics such as The Lord of the Rings, Alice in Wonderland and Chronicles of Narnia, major hits from contemporary adult fiction have been few and far between lately. Gillian Flynn’s twisty bestseller presented a rare opportunity – one that the makers of Fifty Shades of Grey will be hoping to repeat next year.
Over the three-day weekend, top site for Gone Girl was Vue Westfield in west London with an amazing £69,000, followed by Odeon Leicester Square with £58,000. The top cinema outside London was Cineworld Glasgow Renfrew Street. Among indie/arthouse sites, the top performer was Ritzy Brixton with £25,400, followed by Curzon Chelsea and Clapham Picturehouse.
The runner-up
Little-seen by critics until week of release, and seemingly lacking in strong marketable names, Dracula Untold looked very far from a sure thing. So distributor Universal should be more than happy with an opening of £1.71m. That’s a long way behind the debut of Van Helsing in May 2004 (£5.43m including previews of £485,000), although that was a much-hyped creature feature combining several literary legends and toplined by A-lister Hugh Jackman. Dracula Untold is directed by commercials helmer Gary Shore, making his feature debut, and stars Luke Evans and Dominic Cooper. The budget is reported to be $100m. The film currently enjoys a critics’ Metascore of 34/100 and an IMDb user rating of 6.4/10.
The live events
With encore screenings at the weekend adding £125,000 to the total for Billy Elliot: The Musical Live, the event’s cume to date rises to a nifty £2.16m. That’s enough to earn Billy third place in the all-time event cinema chart, behind Secret Cinema’s Back to the Future (£3.54m) and National Theatre’s War Horse (£2.75m). Universal is the distributor of both Back to the Future and Billy Elliot: The Musical Live.
Event cinema proved a lively category last week, thanks to major happenings with Spandau Ballet and Stephen Fry. Last Tuesday, documentary film Soul Boys of the Western World played at cinemas nationwide, with a live feed of Spandau Ballet at the Royal Albert Hall. A gross of £265,000 resulted. The next day, Stephen Fry Live: More Fool Me went out live to 279 cinemas from London’s Royal Festival Hall, grossing £164,000.
The word-of-mouth hits
Mixed weather at the weekend, at least compared with the previous sunny frame, proved a boon to cinemas – although that didn’t stop certain titles (The Riot Club, Sex Tape) declining by more than 60%. Showing especially impressive traction are family titles What We Did on Our Holiday and The Boxtrolls, dipping 8% and 13% respectively. Laika animation The Boxtrolls has now reached a handy £6.09m, which compares with lifetime totals of £7.5m for Coraline and £6.3m for ParaNorman. With the October half-term holiday coming up in a couple of weeks’ time, The Boxtrolls looks well placed to achieve a UK record for Laika. Competition in this sector is coming from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, animation The Book of Life and Disney’s Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.
The Bollywood hit
Grossing £602,000 from 126 screens (including previews of just under £100,000), Hindi hit Bang Bang achieved the second-highest screen average of any film on release at the weekend, behind Gone Girl. It’s the biggest opening for a Bollywood film since Dhoom 3 (debut of £885,000) last December. Bang Bang stars Hrithik Roshan and Katrina Kaif and is directed by Siddarth Anand of Salaam Namaste fame.
The arthouse sector
With Gone Girl calculated to play to arthouse as well as multiplex audiences, and with the London film festival opening this week, the weekend did not prove attractive to distributors of niche fare. With little direct competition, Pawel Pawlikowska’s Ida remained the top non-Bollywood foreign language film in the market, increasing from 16 to 31 cinemas and increasing box-office by 37%. After 10 days, its cume stands at £156,000 – impressive for a film playing at this breadth of release. The Nick Cave film 20,000 Days on Earth broke through the £500,000 mark at the weekend, the first documentary to do so in 2014.
The future
Largely thanks to the arrival of Gone Girl, box-office overall is 28% up on the previous frame, and a welcome 63% up on the equivalent weekend a year ago, when Sunshine on Leith was the top new release. The good news looks set to continue, since a year ago cinemas stayed in the doldrums, whereas this week sees the release of young adult adaptation The Maze Runner, already a significant hit in the US and elsewhere. Annabelle, spun off from The Conjuring, proved potent in the US at the weekend and arrives here on Friday. Already filmed, and presented as event cinema, One Direction: Where We Are – The Concert Film plays nationwide on Saturday. Also in the mix: Jack O’Connell in the much-buzzed Belfast-set ’71; Hugh Grant in The Rewrite; Dakota Fanning in period drama Effie Gray; and Susan Sarandon crime thriller The Calling.
Top 10 films 3-5 October
1. Gone Girl, £4,109,628 from 549 sites (new)
2. Dracula Untold, £1,713,283 from 449 sites (new)
3. The Equalizer, £1,207,129 from 467 sites. Total: £4,280,077
4. The Boxtrolls, £983,015 from 535 sites. Total: £6,093,364
5. What We Did on Our Holiday, £728,228 from 462 sites. Total: £2,083,907
6. Bang Bang, £602,193 from 126 sites (new)
7. Dolphin Tale 2, £536,766 from 419 sites (new)
8. A Walk Among the Tombstones, £310,261 from 366 sites. Total: £3,364,093
9. Guardians of the Galaxy, £277,419 from 289 sites. Total: £28,168,896
10. Pride, £248,654 from 281 sites. Total: £3,265,317
Other openers
Soul Boys of the Western World, £1,609 from 5 screens (+ 30 September live event, £265,211)
Stephen Fry Live: More Fool Me, £164,468 from 279 screens (live event, 1 October)
Haider, £83,619 from 45 sites
Will & Testament: Tony Benn, £75,773 from 80 sites
Life After Beth, £53,427 from 121 sites
Monster High: Freaky Fusion, £20,874 from 81 sites
Violette, £7,983 from 13 sites
Yaan, £5,227 from 5 sites
Withnail & I, £2,516 from 6 sites (rerelease)
Pek Yakinda, £2,358 from 2 sites
Le Jour Se Leve, £2,099 from 6 sites (rerelease)
You and the Night, £895 from 1 site
Bhaiyya Bhaiyya, £176 from 2 sites
Draft Day, £146 from 3 sites
Still the Enemy Within, 1 site, £2585
The Great Train Robbery: A Tale of Two Thieves, 1 site, no data available
• This article was amended on Wednesday 8 October. The original figures for Ida’s box office takings over the last week were incorrect. We said Ida’s take declined by 17% over the last week. In fact, it rose by 37%, expanding from 16 to 31 screens. This has been corrected.
