Box Office Info
Budget: £30 million
Opening Weekend:
-£3,881,704 (UK) (4 April 2010) (402 Screens)
-$19,828,687 (USA) (18 April 2010) (3,065 Screens)
Gross
-£11,597,750 (UK) (13 June 2010)
-$48,043,505 (USA) (27 June 2010)
Why ‘Kick-Ass’ Succeeded At the Box Office (Even If It Doesn’t Feel That Way)
Features By
Cole Abaius on April 19, 2010 |
Updated: Deadline is reporting that Kick-Ass actually won the week by a narrow margin of $19.8 million to $19.6 million for How to Train Your Dragon.
I’m sitting in a giant echo-chamber of a movie theater complete with it’s old-style, curved panoramic screen and chairs that were ordered with gusto by someone in the 1950s. In the Century Park 16, tucked away from the rest of the bustling world in Tucson, Arizona, it’s no surprise that my afternoon screening of Kick-Ass is almost completely empty except for a trio of teens who are skipping school, a middle-aged man who’s slouched down in the back, and a couple that sneak in fifteen minutes into the action.
There’s almost never a huge crowd there (which is part of why I love it), but the bad news for Matthew Vaughn and company is that the scene I witnessed was the norm, not an outlier.
So now everybody is asking the proverbial question about how a movie with that much hype performs with such lackluster at the box office. After all, it came out with geeks screaming its praises from Butt-Numb-a-Thon, from South by Southwest, and from Austin in general. How could all of those positive reviews not lead to success?
It’s fairly simple actually, but the first thing to remember is that Kick-Ass wasn’t a failure except at playing the expectations game. Let’s look at it in context:
Kick-Ass is an indie film made for $30 million that just made $37 million world-wide by its U.S. opening weekend.
Even with the average path a film takes through the theaters, the movie has already made its budget back, will make its advertising budget back by next weekend, and will ultimately be a financial success. It won’t be the smashing success that some predicted, but it will still be a success.
Of course, those raw numbers don’t take into consideration the split between Lionsgate, the theaters, and the film’s producers, so technically the production team has not regained its original investment. However, a film (especially one with this type of budget) making an equitable number back on its opening weekend is a good sign that it will be on schedule to be a positive investment.
People are shifting in their seats about sequel possibilities seeming out of reach now, which is a fine question to ask, but we’ll get to that after taking a look at why Kick-Ass didn’t explode out of the box.
