According to Variety, Godzilla Minus Zero opened to $14.5M on Friday and is tracking to a $32M weekend, a record for a live-action foreign-language opening, while The Cat in the Hat brought in $6M. Deadline puts the Warner Bros. Animation film at $17M to $20M over three days, against an $86M budget.
Seventy years of Dr. Seuss brand-building. A 1957 book, a 1971 movie, a generation of kids forced to sound out the words in kindergarten. The most market-tested children's IP on earth opened to 48 percent critics and a teachers' conference in New Jersey. That is the detail Deadline cannot stop smiling at: nine of The Hat's top ten theaters were in one state, because the teachers were at a conference and the schools were off. The $86M Hat is currently being saved by adults who do not have to be in class.
And it lost to a giant lizard. Godzilla Minus Zero is R-rated, it is a Toho movie with no American studio behind it, and it has a 96 percent audience score and a word-of-mouth index that climbed from 6.8 to 7.4 while everyone was busy writing off the cat. The $30M number the industry called the high end is now the low end. Gkids pulled it off with social buzz 29 percent below genre norms, which is the old trick. A good movie people tell each other about.
The math does not care about your brand. The lizard ate the hat, and the hat's only comfort is Veterans Day.
YOUR TURN: The Hat opens to $17M on an $86M budget. At what point does "it recovers on Wednesday" stop being a plan and start being a prayer?
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