Russell Crowe in 'Unhinged'
Solstice Studios’ Unhinged (review) opened with $4 million in its American debut weekend, earning $2,194 per-theater as the first new wide release in American movie theaters since the industry shut down in mid-March. As such, by default, it had the biggest opening weekend of the summer and the biggest opening since The Hunt ($5.3 million), I Still Believe ($9 million) and Bloodshot ($9 million) opened just before theaters nationwide shut down. The Russell Crowe road-rage thriller played in approximately 70% of the country and opened not on July 1 as planned but in mid-August. The film has been playing overseas, beginning in Germany, for the last month.
As noted yesterday, a movie like Unhinged, a franchise-free, entirely original road-rage thriller starring Russell Crowe as a very bad man who terrorizes a frazzled divorced mother for a minor traffic altercation, is exactly the kind of film that would have struggled theatrically in normal times. Crowe hasn’t been a “by himself” opener in a decade (Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood opened with $37 million in the summer of 2010, ironically the same summer in which Chris Nolan’s Inception opened with $62 million). The theatrical potential of the studio programmer has plummeted in the last five years as general audiences have shifted to streaming and VOD for their non-event-movie needs.
If $4 million seems low by normal standards, well, it is but it’s also right between the $3.7 million debut of A Good Year in 2006 and the $6.5 million Fri-Sun debut of The Next Three Days in 2010 back when people actually went to the movies just to go to the movies. Considering the circumstances of this release, well, it could have been much worse. The appeal of Unhinged was merely that it was a new movie, which is hard when the mere idea of a new movie in theaters hasn’t been an enticement unto itself for a very long time.
Solstice is expecting $8 million domestic by Thursday. The film cost around $33 million, with the hopes of a $30 million domestic final. The film had earned $7.7 million overseas, including Canada, as of last Sunday, so we can presume around $15 million global by tonight. Under normal circumstances, a 7.1x domestic multiplier would be a pipe dream. Inception, in what amounted to a best-case-scenario run ten summers ago, earned 6.7x its $62 million debut for a $292 million domestic cume. That said, it’s not like the multiplexes will be bursting with new options between now and November, so I’ll wait until next weekend before I do any concrete math.
For the record, The Next Three Days, which starred Crowe as a husband/father trying to break his wrongfully-convicted wide out of prison, earned $21.148 million domestic, or a pretty decent 3.2x multiplier. That would be around $13.5 million for Unhinged, but obviously that may end up being an apples-to-oranges comparison. After all, Ridley Scott’s A Good Year didn’t even double its opening weekend with a $7.4 million domestic final gross. One wrinkle is that the film opened in 1,823 theaters yesterday and will expand to 2,300 theaters next Friday where it will face The New Mutants. The whole “post-debut legs” situation will be complicated by adding theaters over the next week or three.
That’s especially true if the likes of New York and California will open their theaters anytime soon. The film played 56% male, 65% Caucasian, 20% Black, 12% Hispanic and 80% over 25. Paramount DI in Los Angeles was the #1 venue in the US, and has just 2 screens—beating out other traditional Top 10 venues that have anywhere between 15-24 screens. Drive-in theaters made up the top five locations this weekend (and six of the top ten), with LA’s Paramount drive-in ranking as the most prosperous location. The real question.
