‘Ready Player One’ Charges Up With $3.75M Wednesday Night Preview
March 29, 2018
‘Ready Player One’ Charges Up With $3.75M Wednesday Night Preview
Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One got an early start at the Easter weekend with a Wednesday night preview of $3.75m.
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Ever since Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull became the director’s highest grossing title at the domestic box office a decade ago, he’s largely confined his filmography to adult oriented, awards season fare. So there haven’t been many previews for Spielberg titles in quite some time. And Ready Player One, though based on the best-selling Ernest Cline YA novel, isn’t franchise property like we’ve seen in Easters past like Batman V. Superman or Fast and Furious. One of the comps here is 2013’s G.I. Joe Retaliation which had Wednesday pre-shows before its Easter launch earning $2.6M, then a $10.5M opening Thursday and a $51M four-day and ending its domestic run at $122.5M. Ready Player One beats hands down Spielberg’s previous popcorn movie, though it skewed considerably younger, The BFG which failed and only made $775K from its Thursday night preview before a $22.7M four-day and awful $55.4M stateside result.
The nature of Spielberg’s movies (mostly all of them) is that they start at smaller numbers and sleep upward from there. $50M would be a nice start for Ready Player One considering the film is pricey at a net cost between $155M to $175M. Ready Player One is also going day and date this weekend in 62 offshore markets including China, but with Japan and Germany coming later. Our analysts predicted a $140M-$170M global debut for this love letter to virtual reality and 1980s-90s pop culture.
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