-Deadline Hollywood
E.L. James’ Fifty Shades Freed continues to keep it up at the B.O. with a $40 million-plus opening weekend, still only 14% off from the opening of Fifty Shades Darker last year ($46.6M), which is a solid ease for a threequel. Threequels are notorious for being the lowest out of a franchise’s bunch at the box office with the exception of most superhero movies
And in second we have Sony Animation’s Peter Rabbit with $22M, which gets an A- CinemaScore tonight — which is the same grade that Illumination/Universal’s Hop earned. That was a similar project (sans the Beatrix Potter source material) built around a British comedian playing a rabbit. That Easter bunny film opened to $37.5M seven years ago and bounced to $108M domestic, $183.9M worldwide. Given the lack of family fare for quite some time, it will be interesting to see if Peter Rabbit jumps higher than that. Sony has a history for reigniting a children’s classic and succesfully turning into popcorn fare: Between two movies, Stuart Little logged $470M worldwide.
Even though this weekend will likely pale in terms of ticket sales when compared to a year ago’s $188.6M, which was built on Lego Batman ($53M), Fifty Shades Darker, and John Wick:Chapter 2 ($30.4M), next weekend is bound to thrust 2018 greatly ahead of 2017 with Black Panther‘s projected $130M-$160M. This weekend’s takeaway is that moviegoing remains very healthy, and as one film financier pointed out, “You have two films that weren’t that well received by critics which are leading the box office and bound to be profitable. Fifty Shades Freed is unwatchable!” Not every film is built for critics, nor should a film’s box office fate be determined by them, but Fifty Shades Freed and Peter Rabbit provide hope for studio executives that some titles can still be built to simply serve the entertaining needs of their audiences.
While Universal went to great lengths to induct the unfaithful (those who never read E.L. James trilogy) on the first Fifty Shades of Grey, they’ve relied on the brand’s fanbase (ComScore/Screen Engine’s PostTrak shows 81% females, with 59% ladies over 25 taking up the most seats), which they stoked socially, and a killer soundtrack recipe which works like it’s the 1980s all over again. While music was always an essential part of movie marketing back then, every now and then that extra ancillary kicks in, raising a pic’s profile further. Such was the case with the Twilight movies, and that’s definitely the case again with the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy.
Universal
Social media monitor RelishMix expounds, “Universal took a page out of its playbook for Fate of the Furious and Sing! by consistently sharing music videos -which obviously included quick looks from Freed– throughout the campaign. Featuring a partnership with VEVO and some of today’s hottest musical artists like Rita Ora & Liam Payne, Sia, Beyonce and Justin Bieber, Freed has been dropping music videos now and again over the past two months leading up to open. In fact, the second most-viewed clip of the campaign behind the film’s official trailer is Liam Payne and Rita Ora’s ‘For You’ music video which has logged over 32M views”. Recently the soundtrack was made available to stream over the internet, with other big Freed music videos being Hailee Steinfeld and BloodPop’s “Capital Letters” at close to 6M over the last week and Julia Michael’s “Heaven” nearing 2M views. In addition, these artists further drive awareness for the pic on social, read Payne has 57M-plus social media followers while Ora, who appears in the movie, counts over 27M.
For a threequel, RelishMix is also praising Freed‘s half billion social media universe reach across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube even though it’s behind the previous chapters of Fifty Shades of Grey (890M) and Fifty Shades Darker (945M). Universal kicked off the campaign in September with an announcement teaser, generating more than 100M views. Two months later, the official trailer drew 200M views-plus.
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