Friday 17 November 2017

The movie's performance in the UK

Yesterday, I went to the Showcase cinema in Dudley to see My Little Pony: The Movie for the third time. I'm not a big film-goer, and in fact this is the first one I have ever seen three times on the big screen. It's almost at the end of its run now, and on a midweek afternoon there were only five people in the auditorium – including someone with a UK PonyCon T-shirt! (Actually, two, as I was wearing mine as well.) But I still enjoyed it a lot and even noticed some things I hadn't picked up on before. (No spoilers here!)

Back at the start of October, I wondered whether the film might actually do better (relatively speaking) over here than in North America. At that point, we weren't even sure how widely it would be carried in UK cinemas. The answer: very. While it didn't generally sprawl across multiple screens per cinema in the way Blade Runner 2049 was, the movie was shown in the vast majority of cinemas. According to Box Office Mojo, the total for the UK, Ireland and Malta (which are lumped together) peaked at 555 cinemas in its third week.

BOM tells me that its UK (etc) weekend rankings for the first four weeks of general release were 6th, 7th, 7th and 11th. Compare that with North America, where it started higher (4th) but then fell more quickly (9th, 15th, 19th). The NA box office after four weeks was a smidgen over $20 million. Over here, the same figure is roughly $4.5m, so 22.5% of the NA total. That seems to me to be a respectable performance: The Lego Ninjago Movie made 20.9% as much here as in NA, for example.

What I don't know is how well (comparably) movie-branded toys have done on each side of the Atlantic, or whether the availability of Pony on free-to-air TV in the UK has helped. I do know that few cinemas here are now showing the film in midweek, and that Paddington 2, which went straight in at no. 1 last week, will eat up a great deal of the family-film market from now until Christmas. So... I might have been overly optimistic to hope MLP:TM would do better over here, but it does seem at least to have held its own.

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