The winner: Thor: Ragnarok
Debuting in the UK with £7.23m over the weekend period, and a six-day £12.38m total including takings from Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday last week, Thor: Ragnarok is the latest Marvel sequel to raise the bar on previous films in the series. The original Thor movie began in May 2011 with £5.45m including £2.34m in previews. Sequel Thor: The Dark World kicked off in November 2013 with £8.67m including £3.10m in previews. Stripping out the previews, Ragnarok has opened 132% up on Thor and 30% up on Dark World.
Ragnarok has delivered the seventh-biggest opening weekend of 2017, behind Beauty and the Beast, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, Despicable Me 3, It, Dunkirk and Fast & Furious 8. If previews are included, it’s the fourth-biggest debut of the year. It’s also October’s biggest ever weekend for a non-Bond film, advises distributor Disney.
The runner-up: Jigsaw
Pitched midway between a reboot and a sequel, Jigsaw revives a horror franchise that previously signalled its end in 2010 with Saw 3D: The Final Chapter. Jigsaw has debuted in the UK with a solid £1.50m, or £1.85m including Thursday previews. That compares with an opening salvo of £3.60m including £659,000 in previews for Saw 3D on Halloween weekend 2010. All seven Saw films posted lifetime totals pretty consistently in the £6.4m to £8.7m range in the UK, with the exception of Saw VI which fell a bit short with £5.4m. They have traditionally achieved pretty weak multiples of their opening numbers, so distributor Lionsgate should be happy if Jigsaw ends up north of £6m by the conclusion of its run.
The arthouse battle: Breathe v Call Me By Your Name
As the winter season approaches, films positioned for awards consideration are coming thick and fast. New releases Breathe and Call Me By Your Name arrived on Friday, with contrasting distribution strategies. STX released Andy Serkis’s directorial debut Breathe, starring Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy, into a relatively wide 462 cinemas. Inevitably that site list includes a swath of regional multiplexes where the film isn’t such an easy sell, diluting the screen average down to £1,042 for the weekend period. The film began with £482,000, or £536,000 including previews.
Sony took a more focused route with Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, starring Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer. The northern Italy-set gay romance opened with £236,000 from 111 cinemas, including negligible previews of £4,000. The director’s previous film A Bigger Splash began in February 2016 with £348,000 from 101 venues, including previews of £43,000.
Both Breathe and A Bigger Splash faced further competition for the non-mainstream audience from Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin, which expanded to 314 cinemas, grossing £813,000 for a 10-day total of £2.47m. Also in the mix are Sally Potter’s The Party and the hand-painted Loving Vincent. All five of these films played at the BFI London film festival in October.
The big fallers: The Snowman and The Mountain Between Us
Falling out of the Top 10 in its third week of play, serial-killer thriller The Snowman dropped a disturbing 81% from the previous session. The adaptation of the Jo Nesbø bestseller, starring Michael Fassbender, is one of the big commercial disappointments of the autumn season.
Also plummeting is The Mountain Between Us, falling from 11th to 25th place with box office down 84% from the previous weekend. This survival romance, which is adapted from the Charles Martin novel and stars Kate Winslet and Idris Elba, is a second example of a current box office underperformer based on popular literary source material.
The market
Thanks to the arrival of Thor: Ragnarok, the market overall is a nifty 84% up on the previous session. However, numbers are up just 1% on the equivalent weekend from 2016, when Marvel’s Doctor Strange was the top new release. Cinema bookers now have hopes pinned on Kenneth Branagh’s star-packed Murder on the Orient Express, arriving on Friday. Wednesday sees the festive season get off to an indecently early start with A Bad Moms Christmas.
Top 10 films, 27-29 October
1. Thor: Ragnarok, £12,375,804 from 611 sites (new)
2. Jigsaw, £1,851,249 from 462 sites (new)
3. The Lego Ninjago Movie, £889,802 from 618 sites. Total: £8,210,047 (3 weeks)
4. The Death of Stalin, £812,288 from 314 sites. Total: £2,469,700 (2 weeks)
5. Blade Runner 2049, £692,999 from 421 sites. Total: £17,416,826 (4 weeks)
6. Geostorm, £659,666 from 494 sites. Total: £3,345,633 (2 weeks)
7. My Little Pony, £622,946 from 551 sites. Total: £2,572,132 (2 weeks)
8. Breathe, £535,675 from 463 sites (new)
9. Happy Death Day, £434,872 from 407 sites. Total: £2,157,390 (2 weeks)
10. Kingsman: The Golden Circle, £373,276 from 326 sites. Total: £24,247,191 (6 weeks)
Other openers
Call Me by Your Name, £235,670 (including £3,765 previews) from 111 sites
Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami, £98,299 (including £81,372 previews) from 13 sites
Ramaleela, £33,111 from 80 sites
Bhalwan Singh, £4,637 from 8 sites
Joshua Vs Takam, £4,148 from 32 sites (live boxing)
Property of the State, £3,797 from 15 sites
Perfect Blue, £3,452 from 13 sites (reissue)
Banana Island Ghost – B.I.G., £2,044 from 12 sites
Base, £1,812 from 1 site
The Shining, £1,448 from 1 site (reissue)
Notorious, £89 from 1 site
Deliver Us (Liberami), The Merciless and Battle of Soho – no figures available
Thanks to comScore. All figures relate to takings in UK and Ireland cinemas.
