3RD UPDATE, Saturday 2:27AM: Even though the entire nation doesn’t celebrate The Columbus Day holiday weekend, it’s providing some extra ducats to studios’ bank accounts thanks to 14% K-12 schools off on Friday and 40% off on Monday. Reaping the benefits of this are the top three movies: 20th Century Fox’sThe Martian which just continues to mine dollars from people’s wallets with an estimated $10.85M Friday night (besting its $9M-$10M matinee projections) and a $36.4M second weekend (vs. its earlier $32M-$34M estimate), Sony’s Hotel Transylvania 2 which is looking at a strong third weekend hold of -21% with $21M and a total cume by Sunday of $117.5M, and Warner Bros.’ Pan which needs every single child out of school and in theaters so that it can make up some ground on its $150M estimated budget. Friday’s B.O. was only $5.2M, with an estimated second place debut of $18.25M…not so good. If Pan cost $15M, we’d be screaming that it was the cash cow of all ages. That’s not the case with its budget right up there on the screen with full-on VFX and zero sets.
Previous feature adaptations of J.M. Barrie’s novel, Hook and Peter Pan,received A-s, but the Joe Wright origins-take on the material from Jason Fuchs’ 2013 Black List script pulled in a B+ CinemaScore. PostTrak shows that 78% of the entire audience said Pan was excellent or very good. It would be nice if these were promising signs for Pan in the long run, however, it carries a 22% Rotten Tomatoes score. If reviews were better for Pan, that would certainly help drive business given Joe Wright’s Oscar-lauded resume at the arthouse. Rentrak’s PostTrak reports that largely older females are turning up for the film respectively at 57% and 58% over 25. However, this appears to be the Hugh Jackman fan club outnumbering moms at the cinema, since only 3% of the audience was under 12.
Warner Bros. has turned its marketing machine on full blast for Pan from set pieces and stunts around the globe to Rooney Mara (Tiger Lily) and Levi Miller working down to the wire with appearances on the Today show Friday morning. However, the press has been shooting flaming arrows at Pan for quite some time. They completely lost it when Mara beat out Lupita Nyong’o and Adèle Exarchopoulos for the role of Tiger Lily. In their mindset, the media believed that a minority should portray Tiger Lily; author J.M. Barrie had always painted her as being Native American. Petitions swarmed the Warner lot calling for the studio to stop casting white actors in non-white roles. Wright defended the casting decision, citing that Barrie never identified Tiger Lily’s nationality in the source material; that it was more appropriate to portray Neverland’s denizens in the film as a group of multi-cultural indigenous folks.
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