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EXCLUSIVE: From New York City to Kansas and onward to the City of Angels, mobs are going to the movies tonight as Universal’s long-awaited Wicked Part One and Paramount’s Gladiator II square off for what is expected to be one of the year’s richest weekends. To date, the biggest weekend for all titles YTD was July 26-28 per Comscore when Deadpool & Wolverine sent the entire marketplace to $285.3M.
Early figures tonight–not attributed to any studios because they stay mum until tomorrow AM– is that Wicked is casting an estimated spell of $8M tonight alone, however, if you count Monday’s Amazon promotion previews and last night’s fan premium format showings, that total preview tally flies to around $20M, I hear. As we told you previously, we heard pre sales were around $30M, however, once there’s a must-see title for female moviegoers, they’ll definitely book a date to the cinema. With walk-up business unpredictable, the outlook is wild for Wicked with a 3-day between $130M-$150M. The argument on the lower end of the projection is that the Jon M. Chu directed, Marc Platt produced movie is 2 hours and 40 minutes.
The biggest opening for any feature musical was Jon Favreau’s 2019 The Lion King at $191.7M; which had a runtime of 1 hour and 58 minutes. The biggest opening for a movie based on a Broadway musical is technically Universal’s Mamma Mia! at $27.7M. Even though the sequel, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, opened bigger at $34.9M, it wasn’t based on a stage musical. Wicked has all the spells to overperform this weekend with 90% certified fresh with critics and 99% audiences score on Rotten Tomatoes.
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Words cannot to begin to detail the amount of marketing oomph that Universal put behind this movie, and more amazingly, they did so on the feature adapation of a Broadway musical, a genre that Hollywood has a love and hate relationship with. Wicked‘s marketing playbook makes Disney’s promotional plans for Star Wars: Force Awakens look like some grassroots guerilla stunt for a SXSW movie.
Granted, the means by which Uni made their preview cash is apples to oranges when compared to previous titles, however, in terms of pure dollars, Wicked‘s total cash is ahead of Beauty and the Beast‘s $16.3M as well as The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1‘s $17M, both female skewing tentpoles. Beauty and the Beast clocked at 2 hours and 9 minutes and opened to $174.7M while Mockingjay 1 was 2 hours and 3 minutes and debuted to $121.8M.
Gladiator II meanwhile is between $6.5M-$7M and that’s for Thursday alone. Duly note, Paramount didn’t have any big preview days in advance, just a small 200 theater “Screen Unseen” sneak. Critics really have nothing to complain about with the Ridley Scott directed sequel at 72% certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. Gladiator II‘s preview dough is akin to that of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny ($7.2M Thursday) which got to a $60.3M opening. That’s right around what Gladiator II is expected to conquer by Sunday.
As we always say on Thursday, take these estimates with a grain of salt. If the studio reports lower, it doesn’t necessarily mean that any movie is without momentum.
What was clear from Deadline’s rounds at theaters tonight, is if you want to get your wiccan on, ya dress up and head over to the TCL Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Blvd, or you head to a place that’s no place like home, read Dorothy’s domicile of Kansas City, KS. Meanwhile, over at the AMC in Burbank, CA, which is usually any film’s highest grossing cinema in the nation in a given weekend, the 6PM Imax of Gladiator II was sold out.
Natalie Sitek contributed to this report
