Related Posts
Source: Deadline
If one were to look at the most recent totals of the weekend box office, they will most likely be unsurprised by the film currently sitting in the top spot: Marvel’s most recent superhero blockbuster “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness”. Although it has been a few weeks since the film was first released to theaters, the lack of any major competition has allowed it to remain the box office champion throughout most of the month of May. According to Box Office Mojo (from which all the following data was derived from) receiving about $187 million during its opening weekend and since accumulating a total of $342.1 million in North America and $461.1 million overseas, bringing its worldwide gross to $803.2 million and making it (at the time of this writing) the highest-grossing film of the year so far. With films like “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Jurassic World: Dominion” coming out over the next few weeks, “Doctor Strange” will most likely be knocked down from its current #1 position sooner than later, but when it does, it will have already earned a substantial amount of revenue that will be difficult to top.
However, sometimes how much a film makes overall is not entirely indicative of its long-term appeal. After all, word of mouth can greatly impact the amount of money received over the course of one weekend as opposed to the previous; if a film is not well liked, then the drop-off from the previous week can be much larger than desired, whereas a film that is well received will only lose a small percentage of what was gained in the week prior. In the case of “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness”, its second weekend box office saw a drop of 67% of what was earned in the previous opening weekend; in its third weekend, the drop was 49%. Neither of these drops imply that the film is a failure by any means, but they do show that its performance was a bit frontloaded (as is often the case for big blockbusters) and that word of mouth is not quite strong enough to encourage people to revisit the film at their local theater. On the exact opposite end of the spectrum is a film that had opened to very little at the box office (at least compared to the average blockbuster), yet has managed to stay afloat with some of the smallest drop-offs one could possibly imagine. That film (which, coincidentally enough, also revolves around the concept of the multiverse) is A24’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once”.
As is often the case for most independent features, “Everything Everywhere All at Once”, written and directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert and starring Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, and Ke Huy Quan among others, had a more gradual rollout in terms of its theatrical release, first coming out in a small handful of theaters before receiving a much wider release over the next few weeks. This is why for the first few weeks of its release, the film’s weekend box office saw increases rather than decreases – receiving $509,965 from only ten theaters in its first weekend, $1.1 million from 38 theaters in its second, and upon its official wide release into 1,250 theaters during its third weekend, a total of $6.1 million. At this point, because the film’s exhibition has supposedly become as widespread as possible, one would expect the following weekends to start seeing significant drops in terms of ticket sales. That’s not what happened with “Everything Everywhere All at Once” though; if anything, the exact opposite happened.
During its fourth weekend of release, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” actually saw an increase of ticket sales from the previous weekend, going up by about 2% with $6.2 million. This might be due to the fact that the number of theaters it played in went up to 2,220, but even that cannot explain how well the film was able to stay strong during the following weeks. In its fifth weekend, the film’s revenue dropped by only 12.3%; in its sixth, there was yet another increase, this time by around 2.2%. In its seventh weekend, the film saw its biggest drop-off yet by 36.3%, though even this is still fairly impressive given how most films see bigger drop-offs than this on a weekly basis. The following weekend, however, saw the return of single-digit-percentage drops, as the film lost only 5.9% of what it earned last weekend; the weekend after that (and the most recent as of this writing), the film had an even smaller drop-off with 5.5%. Throughout these seven weeks of wide release (that is to say not counting its first two weeks in limited distribution), “Everything Everywhere All at Once” has managed to maintain its place in the middle of the top 10 of the box office, staying between the #4 and #6 spots and as of yet not sinking any further.
So far into its run, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” has earned $52.2 million at the domestic box office. This might not seem like much given how much more prominent studio films tend to rake in, but for an independent release, it’s a remarkable feat, especially given how much it opened to. If one were to compare the film’s total gross to that of its first weekend of wide release, then they would see that the film has so far earned 8.6x of its opening weekend gross. For comparison, the total domestic gross “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” is so far only 1.8x of its opening weekend gross. If “Everything Everywhere All at Once” opened as big as “Doctor Strange” did and continued to perform as well as it currently is, it would be one of the highest grossing domestic releases of all time even after adjusting for inflation, surpassed only by “Gone with the Wind” and the original “Star Wars”.
What is the lesson to take away from all of this? Simply put, word of mouth can have a major impact on the film in both the short term and the long term. “Everything Everywhere All at Once” currently has a 95% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes (with an average rating of 8.7 out of 10); on the same site; audience approval is at 90% with an average rating of 4.5 out of 5. Statistics like these demonstrate why the film is slowly but surely building an audience big enough to allow it to remain fairly high up on the box office charts in spite of seemingly earning very little from week to week. Films that are able to generate this kind of long-term momentum are usually the kind that go on to be seen as cinematic classics several years later; if its fortunes continue to be this favorable, then perhaps “Everything Everywhere All at Once” will too become yet another one of those great cinematic classics.
