Laika’s stop-motion animators had better prepare themselves for more work. Coraline is a hit.
Early box-office reports show Coraline, Portland animation studio Laika’s expensive, oddball fantasy, rode the strength of stellar reviews to a $16.3 million opening weekend, far exceeding expectations.
The Oregon-made, Nike-funded cartoon, which opened Friday after a gala premiere in Portland, finished third at the national box office behind He’s Just Not That Into You ($27.5 million) and Taken ($20.3 million), but surprised prognosticators by trouncing its chief family-film competition, The Pink Panther 2, which earned only $12 million.
Even more impressive were the cartoon’s per-screen numbers. Opening on 2,299 screens nationwide (slightly more than the projected 2,100, but still a modest number), Coraline averaged a whopping $7,105 at each location.
Movie-industry analysts told WW last week that Coraline’s tracking numbers, and its modest number of opening-weekend screens, suggested that Laika should keep its expectations low. “If they open at close to $10 million, I think they should be really pleased with that result,” said Paul Dergarabedian, whose Media by Numbers follows Hollywood economics. Other observers had suggested Laika was hoping for a $12 million weekend to justify the movie’s $70 million budget.
Coraline’s $16.3 million weekend even places it ahead of the movie Deragabedian said might serve as a model of stop-motion success: 2005’s Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. But that Aardman Animations release opened on 3,600 screens, while Coraline was released on 2,299 screens, giving Laika’s movie a far superior per-screen average. (Check out this comparison with other stop-motion films, including Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride.)
That sigh of relief you heard coming out of Hillsboro? It just got drowned out by the whoops of joy at Phil Knight’s house.
UPDATE, 6:15 pm: Variety reports that more than 70 percent of Coraline’s haul came from the screens showing the movie in its 3-D format:
“Coraline’s” $16.3 million bow gives 3-D a boost. That opening number is well above what Focus Features had predicted for the dark-tinged toon produced by Laika, Phil Knight’s new outfit. The film showed the upside of the format as 44% of its playdates were in 3-D but they accounted for 70% of the total gross.
Focus distrib topper Jack Foley made a Katzenbergian case for the transformative potential of 3-D based on “Coraline.” The pic’s dark themes and the less-than-commercial history of helmer Henry Selick (“Monkeybone”) prompted even its boosters to try to keep expectations in check.
“It wound up playing very broadly,” Foley said. “It didn’t just settle into the family niche. It did extremely big business at night.”
At L.A.’s ArcLight, for example, the pic punched up $13,500 on Friday and $16,000 more on Saturday in a house not known for family fare. The AMC Empire, a similarly defined locale in Gotham’s Times Square, took in $22,000 on Friday and jumped to $30,000 on Saturday.
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