May 9, 2016

Scary second weekend of "Ratchet & Crank" raises questions about "Sly Cooper" feature

The Canadian/Chinese co-production Ratchet & Clank had a disastrous second weekend, plummeting 70% to a $1.5 million weekend.

The Rainmaker Entertainment movie has earned just $7.1 million to date and could gross less than $10 million over its entire domestic run. The last animated feature to launch in over 2,500 theaters and gross less than $10m was the 2014 film Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return.

R&C's poor performance leads to questions whether Rainmaker's next Playstation game-to-feature adaptation, Sly Cooper, will ever get made. A teaser trailer was produced in 2013 (below), but director Kevin Munroe said at Wondercon last March that the film had not yet entered production.

Vancouver-based Rainmaker, which produced R&C with Blockade Entertainment, had much rosier (perhaps unrealistic) expectations for the film's box office performance. The studio's president Michael Hefferon had suggested in an interview that he thought Ratchet & Clank could outperform the Canadian/Korean co-pro The Nut Job, which grossed $64.3 million in the U.S. during its 2014 run.

On the more successful side of the box office spectrum is the Walt Disney Company, which is obliterating Hollywood records and on pace to have its biggest year ever at the box office. Last week, the studio passed $1 billion domestically in just 128 days. To put that into perspective, no Hollywood film studio had ever achieved that feat before in less than 165 days. The studio also hit the $3 billion global mark last week; the previous record was, again, 165 days, set by Universal last year. More impressive, they've managed to break these records with just a handful of titles.

What has been the secret ingredient in Disney's amazing box office performance this year: animation and vfx, of course. Every film they've released in 2016 has been either totally animated or mostly vfx-driven. Their latest release, Captain America: Civil War, launched with a $181.8m domestically last weekend, and has grossed $675.7m worldwide over its first two weeks of release.

The almost-entirely animated Jungle Book has now grossed $776.2m, while the fully-animated Zootopia is currently the top-grossing movie of the year with $956.4m.

The Annecy Cristal-winning French animated feature April and the Extraordinary World picked up $18,746 from 33 theaters during its seventh U.S. weekend. The GKIDS release has grossed $249,065 domestically, and should pass Ernest & Celestine next weekend to become the distributor's tenth highest-grossing release.

Also, for those wondering whether anyone saw the Korean feature Bling, you'll have to keep wondering. The film's distributor, Momentum Pictures, did not release any box office numbers from its opening weekend.