With Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again set to open tonight, I thought I'd check back in with the last big live-action musical smash. Today marks, if you count Tuesday previews, seven months since the Hugh Jackman/Michelle Williams/Zac Efron/Zendaya/Rebecca Ferguson musical opened in North American theaters. Since then, the film became the rarest of rare things, a word-of-mouth smash, a film that recovered from a soft opening weekend and mixed reviews to become a certifiable smash hit through sheer force of audience will.
That it became one of the leggiest wide releases of all time in 2018, against Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (which was itself a leggy Christmas sensation) is beyond impressive. So how leggy was it? Well, here's the caveat before I get any further: The Greatest Showman opened on a Wednesday, where it earned $4.6 million before entering the traditional weekend, where it earned $8.8m over the Fri-Sun frame for an underwhelming $13.4m five-day weekend.
When tabulating post-debut legs, one usually uses the Fri-Sun figure, even if the film opened on a day other than Friday. Think Shrek 2 which is the leggiest $100m+ opener of all time with $441m from a $108m Fri-Sun frame, even though it technically earned $128m from its full Wed-Sun debut in the summer of 2004. But for the purposes of tracking its legs, we are discussing its overall domestic box office in relation to its $8.8m Fri-Sun frame.
Besides, you can make the case that, for most folks, the Fox/Chermin/TGS release didn’t really “open” until Christmas Day (Monday the 25th), when it earned $5.5 million and really took off. It earned $2.445m on its opening day, a daily total that it wouldn’t match (or fall below) until its 16th day in theaters. As for that $8.8m Fri-Sun frame, it wouldn’t earn that little over a weekend until its seventh weekend when it earned $7.6m in early February. By that point, it had earned $137.3m domestic, or just under the $151m total of La La Land. It would be past that Oscar winner’s lifetime domestic cume just 1.5 weeks later.
Due to reasons that should be obvious by now (the catchy songs, the upbeat tone, the relentless pace, the cast, its uniqueness as an original live-action musical, its status as an adult movie that kids could enjoy, etc.), the film had the leggiest run for a wide opener since James Cameron’s Titanic 20 years ago. Like the western, the musical is one of those genres that everyone claims is dead but, when studios bother to make and market a big one, tends to bring in the bucks. It’s an “if you build it, they will come” genre, and a splashy live-action musical still qualifies as a theatrical event in this Netflix/VOD era.
There has essentially been one major live-action musical at least once a year since Mulan Rouge back in 2001, and many of them (Chicago, Enchanted, Mamma Mia!, Les Misérables, La La Land, Beauty and the Beast, etc.) have done very well here and abroad. Even Sony’s Annie remake legged it to $85m domestic from a $15m weekend in late 2014. So there is little reason to assume that Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again won’t be a solid hit when it opens tonight, whether or not it approaches the last film’s $144m domestic and $609m (!) worldwide total from back in 2008.
But it probably won’t be as leggy. When the dust cleared, FOX, Chermin and TGS’s The Greatest Showman earned $174.312 million in North America alone. That represents a jaw-dropping 19.8x multiplier from its $8.8m Fri-Sun frame. If you want to count the Wed-Sun total, that’s still a 13x multiplier (Shrek 2 earned 3.4x its Wed-Sun debut), which is almost certainly a record for a movie that opened wide on a Wednesday.
Among movies that opened on at least 750 screens on opening weekend and had a standard Fri-Sun frame (none of this “opened on Christmas Day Sunday” nonsense), it is the sixth-leggiest domestic release ever. And among movies that opened on at least 1,200 screens, it sits behind only James Cameron’s Titanic.
The film rose 76% from its first weekend to its second, setting a record for any movie opening on 2,000 screens or more since the three bigger jumps were Christmas movies (Rumor Has It, Fences and War Horse) that opened on Saturday or Sunday.
Among all wide releases that had a Fri-Sun frame as part of the opening weekend, its 19.8x weekend-to-final multiplier sits behind Fatal Attraction ($156.6m domestic from a $7.6m Fri-Sun debut on 758 screens in 1987), Titanic ($600m/$28m on 2,674 screens in 1997), Top Gun ($176.8m/$8.2m on 1,028 screens in 1986), Crocodile Dundee ($174.8m/$8m on 879 screens in 1986) and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial ($359.2m/$11.8m on 1,103 screens in 1982).
So, in comparing screen count and post-debut legs, it’s basically Titanic and The Greatest Showman. It earned $434 million worldwide, including $47.8m in Japan (the Hollywood biggest movie of 2018 thus far in the third-biggest market), $15.9m in China and $62.36m in the UK from a $6.3m debut weekend. It has sold one million copies via Blu, DVD and VOD and has become the first title to sell over 500,000 digital sales in the United Kingdom.
It is the third-biggest live-action musical in North America (sans inflation) since 1974 (behind Grease and Beauty and the Beast) and the fifth-biggest live-action musical worldwide behind Beauty and the Beast ($1.26 billion), Mamma Mia! ($609m), La La Land ($441m) and Les Misérables ($441m). Not bad for a movie that essentially bombed over the Christmas holiday. And, yes, it was leggier than Scream too. For better or worse, Disney now has a new vital IP to exploit alongside the X-Men series and the Avatar franchise.
