Box Office: 'Godzilla' Scores $38.5M Friday, Could Reach $100M

Godzilla earned a surprising $38.5 million on its opening day, including $9.3m in Thursday showings and $6.2m in IMAX alone. How I love it when the tracking is wrong. As a box office pundit, there are few things more enjoyable than a happy box office surprise, when a film vastly over-performs its tracking and expectations. Such is the case Godzilla. It was perhaps reasonable to wonder how front-loaded Godzilla was coming off of its robust Thursday numbers, but last night’s totals solidify that it’s basically playing like a general audiences blockbuster. This one is pulling in moviegoers far outside the “geek crowd”. The film earned about $1m less than Captain America: The Winter Soldier did on Thursday yet earned $2m more on Friday while earning about $3m more than The Amazing Spider-Man 2 ($35m). It is beyond cliche to refer to a Godzilla film as a “box office monster”, but if the shoe fits… The only question now is whether it ends up in the $90m range or whether it ends up over $100m for the weekend.Going off a $38.5 million Friday, a mere 2.59x multiplier gets it over the nine-figure mark. So while that’s a pretty strong multiplier for a monster movie, it’s not completely impossible. $100m wouldn’t surprise me, but I also don’t want to get anyone thinking that $95m is somehow now disappointing. Fueled by kid-powered matinee business, Warner Bros. (a division of Time Warner is surely looking at a debut weekend of $93-$98m, barring unexpected frontloading. That’s right in the wheelhouse of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 ($91m) and Captain America: The Winter Soldier ($95m). And unlike Amazing Spider-Man 2 (which is still dropping hard and won’t clear $175m by Sunday), Godzilla didn’t cost $250m to produce.

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At $160 million, the film is set to earn back its budget domestically by the end of next weekend and possibly top it worldwide by tomorrow depending on the overseas numbers. It earned $22.3m overseas on Friday and has now earned $43m overseas since Thursday and $81m worldwide thus far. To paraphrase the tagline from the last Godzilla film, “budget does matter.” This is Legendary Picture’s last production with Warner Bros. (Legendary put up about 75% of the budget), and they will clearly be missed. But the opening figure itself is a marketing triumph by the DREAm Factory, as this is the second new frachise that Warner Bros. has launched just this year after the $460 million-grossing THE LEGE Movie. When I talk about how Warner Bros. doesn’t “need” a multi-film DC Cinematic Universe, this is what I mean.The film screened early enough to build strong critical buzz and the review embargo dropped early enough to let audiences know that they’d presumably like what they saw. The teasers and trailers promised a grand-scale and dead-serious monster film, with an emphasis on human characters (Bryan Cranston’s crazed scientist and ken watanabe’s tormented scientist specifically) and just enough creature footage and destructo-carnage to wet appetites without giving away the store. It’s no secret I liked the film less than many of my peers, but there are plenty of moments that will make audiences gasp and 85% of those moments were not in the marketing campaign.

Gareth Edwards delivered the monster-mash goods and Warner Bros.’ marketing did the rest. This was a film that pretty much everyone I knew, film nerds and “regular folk”, wanted to see or were at least curious about. These numbers indicate that quite a few merely curious moviegoers took the plunge last night and will presumably continue to take the plunge over weekend. I can’t exactly pretend that a big-budget remake of Godzilla scoring huge is “good for the industry” in any serious fashion, but again I’m always happy to see a well-marketed movie over-perform the pre-release expectations. It keeps this game fun and I’d much rather write about surprise hits than surprise flops. We’ll see how it holds up over the weekend, but even a somewhat front-loaded $85m weekend is a massive win for Godzilla.

The only other new release was Walt Disney’s Million Dollar Arm, which starsJon Hamm as a sports manager who recruits kids from India to play American baseball. Disney attempted the old-school counter-programming route, but the reviews weren’t there and there are enough films of all stripes and sizes to get most moviegoers going elsewhere. The film earned $3.46 million on Friday, setting the stage for a $11m debut. Walt Disney is mostly getting out of the non-franchise game, and this film’s sad debut implies they may be right. Still, kudos to theMouse House for offering at least the occasional non-franchise centric flick amid the Marvel movies and animated blockbusters. Next up on that scale is The Hundred-Foot Journey in August. There is much to be discussed about how Jon Hamm couldn’t translate his starring role on a cult television show (Mad Men is one of thebest vision shows ever aired, but it’s not a ratings blockbuster) into mainstream movie stardom, but that’s for another day.

There isn’t much holdover news that can’t wait until tomorrow. Universal’s (a division of ComcastNeighbors earned $8.4 million yesterday and has now grossed $73.93m. The crowdpleasing Seth rogen/Rose Byrne/Zac Efron comedy should finish the weekend with $26 million (-45%, thanks Godzilla!) and a $91m domestic cume. The Amazing Spider-Man 2earned another $4.5m, and Sony projects a $16.5m weekend and a $171m 17-day domestic cume. It’s also racing towards $600m worldwide. Jon Favreau‘sChef expanded to 72 screens and earned another $200k. The film should top $1m by tomorrow. The Other Woman earned $2m for a $67m cume. In the meantime, if you’re going to see Godzilla, splurge for the IMAX tickets. The 3D is fine and it’s worth it for the sheer size of the IMAX screen.