Disney: lower your expectations
In only its second week of release, Black Widow has been toppled from the top spot at the US box office when ticket sales dropped by 67%. Naturally, the National Association of Theatre Owners attributed this stunning second weekend collapse
to the film being made available immediately on streaming.
However, the scale of subsequent drop-off will be of concern to Marvel studio bosses given its $200m (£145m) budget and raise questions over the viability of the dual release model, despite Disney's initial positivity.
In its first two weeks, the $200M budget film has taken an estimated $264M globally at the box office, with an additional $60M from Disney+ subscribers. Revenue from streaming sales goes directly to Disney's coffers, rather than being shared with the theatres, so the company may well accept the lower overall take as a reasonable success.
But I hope that the film does lose money. Anything that loses Disney money is a good thing.
Another good thing is that, as a US organisation, the National Association of Theatre Owners knows how to spell theatre
. Heartening. (thumbup)
While $166.3M revenue doesn't look too bad against a $200M production budget, a general rule-of-thumb is that the marketing and distribution for a film of this magnitude amount to approximately 150% of the production cost. So the overall cost of the film is somewhere in the region of $500M.