Weekend Preview: SpongeBob Ready to Run Away with the Box Office
August 13, 2020
For the first time in a long, long time there are wide releases to talk about. That is, two films are opening wide... in Canada: The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run and Unhinged. While Canada is a lot smaller than the United States, it is still a large enough part of the domestic box office that we should see the best domestic weekend since the pandemic caused theaters to be shut down in March.
The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run is the third film in the SpongeBob SquarePants franchise, and since the previous two were surprise hits at the box office, I have high hopes for this one, relatively speaking. While the number of daily COVID-19 cases in Canada is less than 10% of where they are in the United States on a per capita basis, there are still restrictions in theaters in most parts of the country. Also, there are almost no early reviews to discuss, so it is hard to tell if the film works or not. On the other hand, there is a lot of pent up demand for a family film and no direct competition. If this film did as well as the previous two films then it would make about $5 million during the weekend. However, since there are limits on the seating in place, even getting halfway there could be asking too much. I choose to be optimistic and so I’m going with $3 million. I think the demand to see a movie in a theater will be high enough to overcome issues with seating limitations. That said, anything above $1 million will be at least a marginal success.
On the other hand, I’m less optimistic about Unhinged. This film has opened in a number of international markets and the critical and commercial success in these markets has been mixed, to be polite. For example, the movie did relatively well in Australia with $1.2 million so far, but this is also Russell Crowe’s native market, so that very likely had an effect there. On the other hand, the U.K. is twice the size of Australia, but the movie has made less than half as much there so far. Canada and Australia have about the same population, but I think Russell Crowe’s box office draw is closer to what it is in the U.K. This means this film should earn about $200,000 here. Anything more than $500,000 would be a good sign that the box office is ready to bounce back, at least in Canada. Next week we will get a sense of where it is in the United States.
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Filed under: Weekend Preview, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run, Unhinged, SpongeBob SquarePants, Russell Crowe