Phantom Menace at the Box-Office
Sunday, February 12th, 2012 at 11:05 am Category: Movies, Star Wars, TopI’m a box office nerd and I love seeing how much movies make or don’t. In this day and age, opening weekends are the most important numbers you’ll need to show whether or not your film is a success.
The Phantom Menace was going to be a test.
Angry fanboys in many circles were convinced that since they were boycotting it it would do poorly in the theatre.
More level headed fans like myself relished the thought of taking our kids to see it for the first time on the big screen and were rewarded with a great time and the single best post-conversion 3D we’ve ever seen.
But how well did it do?
Well, the weekend estimates are in and it’s being guessed that The Phantom Menace in 3D pulled in $23 million dollars.
Sure, it came in fourth at the box office, but for a rerelease of a movie that everyone and their cousin has seen and was allegedly despised by all, that’s a pretty incredible number. And I don’t see it dropping off much any time soon with all the good press the conversion has been getting. And I’m not sure if anyone else has noticed, but with the softened expectations and people enjoying the film for what it was instead of what it wasn’t, the reviews that have been coming in from sensible critics have been unanimously more good than bad. (Check out this balanced EW piece, for instance.)
You should check out my full review of the 3D here.
I’ll update this post with the actual numbers, but as it stands, $23 million is impressive… Most impressive.
Responses to “Phantom Menace at the Box-Office”
For one of the major Star Wars films it’s not very good. Lion King was the first to attemp the 3D rerelease and beat that number handedly, along with everything else in theaters at that time, reigning as number one. It had also just been released on Imax in 02. So, comparitively, it didn’t set any records. Although, we may have to wait and see how Titanic does to properly guage the film.
Big Shiny Robot… isn’t this the same guy who was an apologist for all the horrid changes to the blu-ray editions? Like denying the “Noooooo” change to RotJ was real? So basically a diehard Star Wars fanboy.
No one defended the bad changes in the Blu-ray. And I didn’t deny the NOOO change wasn’t real. I was doubtful it was real until I had proof.
And there’s nothing wrong with being a fanboy.
I’m sorry but 25 million for a movie with such negative hyperbole online is pretty damn good. It has pretty much done Lion King business in the end and did better than Beauty and the Beast. Lion King was also released during a better part of the year for the box office.
In fact, I would say this movie will not suffer from the dramatic box office drop off the other films do.
For a movie that just came out on Blu-ray less than six months ago, that’s pretty damn impressive.
$23million seems reasonable. But it doesn’t answer an important question, one I imagine Brian can answer. How much did they spend to convert it? Was this profitable?
From what I understand with these recent 3D conversions is that they’re extremely cheap. Disney gloated a little bit about how inexpensive it was for them to do. It’s more difficult to make live action 3D, but because a majority of this film is animated they can just go in and pop things out like a children’s book. Also, I see a massive drop off for this film, no one’s going to walk into a theater and say, “oh, good, Phantom Menace is back in theaters, let’s all see that.”
What a shill. With today’s 3D prices, 23 million is chump change and 4th place had to be a disappointment. It’s only going to get lower for the other ‘prequels’. I don’t care if they spent 0 dollars on the films, it still takes millons in advertising to release a movie.
Of course I don’t think they’re losing money but this isn’t a huge success like the ’97 re-releases.
We’ll see what a good 3D re-release number is for comparison with Titanic. We’ll see if 23 million is impressive, very impressive.
I’m going to walk into the theater a few more times in the next few weeks and say, “Good! Phantom Menace is back in theatres! I’m seeing it!”
And I’m not alone.
And yeah, this film probably won’t do as well as Attack of the Clones, or Revenge of the Sith, or the classic trilogy, but this is still a solid showing.
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