news

한어Русский языкEnglishFrançaisIndonesianSanskrit日本語DeutschPortuguêsΕλληνικάespañolItalianoSuomalainenLatina

Last weekend, Deadpool and Wolverine still took the North American box office champion. This Marvel superhero movie earned $54 million in the third weekend after its release, and its total North American box office has reached $494 million. The global box office has exceeded the billion-dollar mark. It is worth mentioning that the romantic film Love, Here and There, starring Blake Lively, the wife of "Deadpool" Ryan Reynolds, had a brilliant opening performance and ranked second with a box office difference of only $4 million.

Deadpool and Wolverine poster

The opening of "Love, So Far" far exceeded expectations

"Love, Here Ends" opened in 3,611 theaters over the weekend and earned an astonishing $50 million in the opening box office. Even Sony Pictures, the distributor, probably didn't expect it to achieve such a good result. This is the first time since Bruce Willis' "Die Hard 2" and Demi Moore's "Ghost" in 1990 that an actor couple has fought separately for the weekend box office champion.

Poster of Love, So Far

The production cost of "Love, So Far" was only 25 million US dollars. It is adapted from the best-selling novel of the same name and tells the story of a man and a woman from meeting, falling in love, getting married to breaking up. The author Colleen Hoover may be a relatively unfamiliar name for Chinese readers, but in the past few years she has definitely been one of the hottest best-selling authors in Europe and the United States. Statistics show that Hoover alone accounted for 8 of the 25 best-selling English books in the world in 2022, and her popularity has long surpassed best-selling authors such as James Patterson and JK Rowling.

Born in 1979, Colin was originally just an ordinary woman living in Texas, USA. She got married in her early 20s and had three children with her husband Hoover, a truck driver. She usually worked as a clerical worker in a social welfare agency. In 2011, she used her spare time to write the love novel "Because of Love, So Let Go". After self-publishing the following year, it unexpectedly became a hit, allowing her to transform into a full-time writer, and she couldn't stop from then on.

Colin Hoover writes very quickly, basically maintaining the pace of publishing three novels a year. However, before 2021, although her books were also on the bestseller list, the readership was relatively narrow and concentrated in the United States. The reason why she really became popular was that during the epidemic, someone recommended her book "Love, So Far" published in 2016 on the book sharing community "BookTok" of the overseas version of TikTok. After that, this novel became a phenomenal bestseller, and it also attracted the attention of Justin Balduni, the director of the romantic film "Five Feet Apart". He bought the film rights of the novel out of his own pocket and personally played the male protagonist.

In hindsight, the phenomenal box office success of Love, Here and There was clearly driven by loyal fans of the original novel. 84% of the audience in the first weekend were female, a truly astonishing gender gap. Unlike the Chinese film market, which has been dominated by female audiences in recent years, the main force of the North American film market has always been young men. Last year's Barbie and Taylor Swift's concert film both successfully aroused the enthusiasm of North American female audiences to watch movies, and ultimately achieved high box office returns. This time, Love, Here and There is probably the same reason.

Stills from Love, So Far

On the other hand, the story of "Love, So Far" itself is not out of the ordinary love story stereotypes, and the lack of criticism of the male protagonist's domestic violence tendency has been boycotted by many female audiences. Therefore, its box office stamina is still questionable.

Borderlands: The Game-Adapted Movie Was a Complete Failure

Another new film that was released on a large scale, which was in stark contrast to "Love, So Far" in terms of investment and box office performance, was the action comedy "Borderlands" directed by Eli Roth and starring Cate Blanchett.

Borderlands poster

Borderlands is adapted from a first-person shooter game that is very popular worldwide. Logically, its mass base should be larger than that of Love, So Far. In addition, with the help of big-name actors such as Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, and Jack Black, the production cost is as high as 110 million US dollars. In addition, it is said that the distributor Lionsgate has invested about 30 million US dollars in publicity and promotion. It can be seen that its innate conditions in all aspects are not insufficient.

However, after the release of "Borderlands", critics and audiences were not impressed, which shows that its quality is indeed worrying. The film's freshness on the film review website "Rotten Tomatoes" was zero as soon as it was released, and then slowly rose to 9%, and was criticized by the media. In particular, some critics who claimed to be players of the game pointed out that the adaptation of "Borderlands" was a complete failure. Even the choice of 55-year-old Cate Blanchett to play the leading female role did not fit the original character at all, and seemed quite lacking in sincerity. It is no wonder that "Borderlands" only earned $8.8 million in the opening box office after it was released in 3,125 North American theaters over the weekend.

Stills from Borderlands

High-quality IP and family-friendly movies remain the main box office drivers

Overall, the total North American box office this weekend was about $159 million, up 36% from the same period last year, and the year-on-year box office decline so far this year has been reduced to 16%. This is good news for all walks of life in Hollywood. It is no secret that this year's North American summer box office started low and ended high, which ultimately satisfied all walks of life. In response to this, the August 7 issue of The Hollywood Reporter published a special article titled "How the Summer Box Office Went from Tragedy to Miracle", analyzing the causes and consequences of this phenomenon.

As we all know, due to the strike of the Writers Guild and the Actors Guild of America in 2023, there was a gap in the supply of new films this year, and the North American film market has been sluggish throughout the first half of the year. In particular, the box office revenue in the second quarter fell by nearly 28% year-on-year, which made many people worry that the epidemic and streaming media have completely changed the entire film ecology, and the cinema industry will never recover. Fortunately, after entering June, the haze gradually dissipated. Sony Pictures' "Bad Boys 4", Paramount's "A Quiet Place: Invasion Day", Disney's "Inside Out 2", Universal Pictures' "Despicable Me 4" and "Twister", Neon Pictures' horror film "Long Legs" and Disney's "Deadpool and Wolverine", one after another, pulled the year-on-year revenue gap of the North American box office in 2024 back to 16.4%.

It seems that high-quality IP movies and family movies will continue to be the main driving force of the North American box office for a long time to come. As Alan Bergman, co-chairman of the Disney Group, said: "We have had a great summer, which proves that when you launch high-quality movies, audiences will still be very happy to go to the theater to watch them. Looking forward to the future, we are encouraged by our momentum and hope that the entire industry can maintain this momentum."