Sat. AM Write-thru, 8:02 AM on Friday 3rd update, 11:10PM: When Marvel boss Kevin Feige announced the title for the third Thor back in October 2014, he said that Ragnarok meant “the end of all things”. When it comes to this weekend’s box office, Thor: Ragnarok isn’t the end of anything, rather the beginning of the holiday season for exhibitors. Let their share prices soar. According to latenight ticket sales right now, Thor: Ragnarok has clocked a $46.8M opening day (including $14.5M previews) and is flying toward an opening between $116.5M-$118M+ at 4,080 theaters, the 7th best opening in November, and the 9th title to open north of $100M for the month. No wonder why other studios are envious of Marvel: Typically we expect threequels to sag in their openings, but here’s Thor:Ragnarok pouncing on all box office statistics and blasting away its 2011 opening ($65.7M) and 2013 sequel Thor: The Dark World ($85.7M).
CinemaScore audiences gave Thor: Ragnarok an ‘A’ CinemaScore tonight, the 12th ‘A’ earned by a Marvel Cinematic Universe title, and the highest CinemaScore ever for a Thor movie. With each movie, the audience response has gotten better moving from a B+ with Thor to A- with Thor: Dark World to now. Between Doctor Strange and Moana last November, Disney owned a third of the month’s $960M business. Expect that share to be higher this month after Disney/Pixar’s Coco opens over Thanksgiving and pulls in every member of the family from toddlers to grandparents. It’s that good and will move everyone to tears in the Toy Story 3 sense of the word.
Currently, Thor: Ragnarok is expected to dip 12% on Saturday with roughly $40.5M, but the groundswell of great buzz could push the beefcake superhero higher. As PostTrack indicated, already a third of Thursday night’s audience plans to see this threequel again.
What’s working here? Marvel never takes the development of their sequels for granted and this one took three years to make. That speaks to Marvel’s sense of perfectionism and how they’re not in the business of rushing films out for a cash grab. Quality and excellent box office results go hand-in-hand. In October 2014, the pic’s first two screenwriters, Thor: Dark World‘s Christopher Yost and Marvel TV writer Craig Kyle were hired to write a first draft. That month Marvel boss Kevin Feige announced the title of the Thor threequel with a release date of July 28, 2017 (Boy, the difference Ragnarok would have made at the summer box office). By February 2015, Marvel needed more time so Thor: Ragnarok was pushed to Nov. 3, 2017. By that October, Oscar-nominated live action short Two Cars, One Night director Taika Waititi became attached after others lobbied for the job. Marvel presented ten ideas to prospective candidates and asked them to come back with a clearer vision of the feature. Waititi came back with a sizzle reel that blew the Marvel team’s socks off. That included using clips from other films including Big Trouble in Little China and scoring the reel to Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” which was used in the final cut of the movie and in the pic’s marketing materials to set its anarchistic, visual tone. Typically Marvel doesn’t encourage sizzle reels, but Waititi’s proved how he would define the picture.
The big marketing hook for Ragnarok was its Thor vs. Hulk fight, a battle which has occurred at least 15 times throughout the Marvel comics and began in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s 1963 The Avengers No. 3. In that comic, Hulk had turned against the Avengers. The team then tried to bring him under their control and tracked the green monster to New Mexico where Hulk and Thor engaged in a battle on a speeding train. The fight resulted in Hulk tying Thor up in railroad tracks. There was another fight whereby Hulk teamed with Mjolnir to fight Thor.
The April debut of the first teaser-trailer smashed Disney and Marvel Studios records with 137M views worldwide in the first 24 hours, beating out Beauty and the Beast’s 127M+ and Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ 112M. And following the film’s Comic-Con panel and trailer debut in July, Thor: Ragnarok led social media buzz for movies for three straight weeks, according to comScore’s PreAct tracking.
Thor: Ragnarok topped Fandango’s most-anticipated fall movies list. Advance ticket sales launched with an exclusive in-game spot in the Thursday Night Football NFL season opener and the debut of seven character motion posters, plus Twitter partnership with Fooji. Other notable sport surrounds included Mayweather v McGregor and Canelo v GGG fights. October was rebranded as “31 Days of Helaween” with Twitter emoji, Facebook ios stickers, Snapchat lens, and custom content created with Awesomeness TV influencers and Disney Digital Network. Promotional partners for the threequel included Red Robin, Synchrony Financial, United Healthcare, Renault (Brazil), and Screenvision Media.
Critics have embraced Thor: Ragnarok with a 93% Certified Fresh Rotten Tomatoes score, the best RT since 2008’s Iron Man (94%). New York Post‘s Sara Stewart says, “It’s witty, it’s weird and it goes against decades of bloated, overserious comics fare,” while New Yorker‘s Richard Brody beams that Thor: Ragnarok works because Marvel is entrusting the property to indie director Waititi’s sensibilities: “A sensibility that, with comedy and cleverness, reflects detectable delight in turning the giant toolbox of the expensive cinema into a toy chest.”
A Bad Moms Christmas
STXfilms
It looks like older women finally came out to see STXfilms’ A Bad Moms Christmas which is looking at $5.5M today, +175% over Thursday with a three-day of $15.7M for the weekend and $20M+ for the five-day stretch. It’s an OK result for a $28M budgeted-sequel, but not spectacular. Many rival distributors have dinged STXfilms for releasing this R-rated female raunchy comedy on a Wednesday. Opening on a Friday sends a message to moviegoers that your film is an event. But what’s really slowing A Bad Moms Christmas down is its exit polls and word of mouth: The pic has a B CinemaScore to the first installment’s A, and the overall positive score on PostTrak is a very low 67%. Women over 25 (58%) gave it a 70% overall positive score and females under 25 enjoyed it at 85% — but the latter isn’t showing up en mass, repping only 14% of the audience. Social media monitor RelishMix heading into the weekend noticed, “the convo surrounding the Bad Moms sequel is mixed down-the-middle. On Facebook, many women are expressing interest in girls night outs with friends/other moms while there’s also been dissent surrounding the premise of the film which some continue to protest sequel-mania. Other convo suggests that this franchise could be spun-off with other holiday themes like Bad Moms Easter, New Years, Thanksgiving. There’s even chatter about the timing regarding a Christmas title while it’s still fall.”
These B.O. results aren’t that far from the results of DreamWorks/Paramount’s Office Christmas Party last year ($17.5M three-day, $20.3M five-day, Friday-Tuesday) even though that pulled in a 50/50 male-to-female split. Office Christmas Party was co-storied by A Bad Moms Christmas helmers Jon Lucas and Scott Moore. At $45M, that all-star raunch was more expensive than A Bad Moms Christmas. One upside here is that A Bad Moms Christmas has two months of play versus Office Christmas Party‘s three weeks. Still, some think that A Bad Moms Christmas will end up where Office Christmas Party did at $54.8M. It’s an understatement to say that raunchy comedies don’t work anymore on the big screen. The sub-genre needs to be blown up and evolved. One of the reasons why STXfilms went ahead with a sequel is because they noticed the hashtag #badmoms trending on social well after the first movie opened with mothers posting crazy photos of themselves online (read a woman with an infant drinking wine). The want for a sequel seemed to be there with the creators believed the best way to raise the stakes was with a Christmas setting.
A Bad Moms Christmas really tried to take a hold of social with their castmembers working overtime to promote it with a strong social media universe of 228M across YouTube views, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The problem per RelishMix is that STXfilms is still a young studio, so when materials post, they don’t spread like wildfire. Compare this to a studio like Disney, whose sister TV networks, radio and brands further fuel materials to go viral. The repost rate from 43 A Bad Moms Christmas clips on YouTube is 3:1 well behind the 9:1 average for this type of film according to RelishMix. Notable online videos came from Buzzfeed and Vanity Fair where Kristen Bell, Mila Kunis and Kathryn Hahn were involved in Truth or Dare Jenga (800K views) and touching weird things in a box (1.8M). Bell at 7M is by far the social media leader in the cast across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram