Box office: historic fiasco for Megalopolis, The Wild Robot seduces the public

All destinies crossed this weekend at the American box office. While the animated film The Wild Robot started nicely and stole first place in the ranking from Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, MegalopolisFrancis Ford Coppola’s latest film, had one of the worst recent starts.

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Dreamworks rit, Coppola pleure

Beetlejuice 2 has finally been dethroned! The credit goes to Robot sauvagethe latest production from the Dreamworks studio (Shrek, Kung Fu Panda). With 35 million dollars for its launch, the feature film records nothing less than the third best start for an animated film for the month of September, behind the first two opuses Hotel Transylvania.

The Wild Robot (in French cinemas on October 9) has so far totaled $53 million worldwide. A start that may seem light, but excellent reviews and good word of mouth should allow the film to hold up well over the coming weeks, and to absorb its relatively modest budget of 78 million dollars without worry.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice may have given up its crown, but it’s still going strong, and still raking in 16 million in its fourth weekend. The film is thus on the way to becoming director Tim Burton’s second biggest success on American soil, ahead of Batman (251 million) and behind Alice in Wonderland (334 millions).

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The sequel to the 1988 film is definitely one of the great surprise hits of 2024, with nearly 400 million generated worldwide. Warner continues its great year by resurrecting a franchise from beyond the grave, and a third film is undoubtedly already in the studio’s pipeline.

No miracle on the contrary for Transformers : Le Commencement. Paramount’s animated film failed to convince the general public and reverse the trend following its disappointing launch. It thus lost more than 62% of its audience during its second weekend and only collected 9.3 million dollars. It currently has barely 72 million worldwide.

In the rest of the box office, the horror film Speak No Evil with James McAvoy still grossed $4.3 million in its third weekend, down just 25% from last week. Despite a light start, Blumhouse production is holding up surprisingly well and will slowly reach 60 million worldwide. Not bad for a production with a budget of only 15 million greenbacks.

But the event of the week took place outside the top 5: Megalopolisthe latest film by the legendary Francis Ford Coppola with a substantial budget of 120 million dollars only collected 4 million for its debut in theaters. A public failure coupled with murderous reviews condemning the feature film, which stands out as one of the most important commercial failures of recent years. It is thus on the verge of losing more than a hundred million dollars to the filmmaker and his distributor Lionsgate.

A failure of this magnitude can be compared to that of Heaven’s Gate (1980) by Michael Cimino, who at the time caused the bankruptcy of the United Artists studio, or the more recent Horizon by Kevin Costner, which only totaled 36 million this summer, for a budget of over 100 million. The fiasco of Megalopolis takes a serious blow to this category of very personal projects by isolated filmmakers, who have failed to capture the public’s attention.

US box office September 27-29, 2024 (estimates)

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