As ‘Inferno’ Crosses $100M Overseas, Ron Howard Movie Hopes To Light Fire Stateside – Box Office Preview
Director Ron Howard already is seeing a bump at the box office with his third Dan Brown feature adaptation, and the film hasn’t even opened in North America yet.
As Nancy Tartaglione reported today, Inferno has been playing in 58 offshore markets, where it’s racked up more than $100M during the past two weeks. That’s already more than the worldwide cumes for each of the director’s past three titles: 2015’s In the Heart of the Sea ($93.9M global), 2013’s Rush ($90.2M) and 2011’s The Dilemma ($69.7M). Inferno obviously will be slowed by threequelitis stateside, and Sony played its cards well in maximizing the overall B.O. for this $75M-budgeted Tom Hanks movie, which costs half of the franchise’s last title, 2009’s Angels & Demons ($485.9M). Rivals estimate global P&A for Inferno at $125M.
Inferno is the only wide release for the weekend, and projections lie in the low- to mid-$20M range at an estimated 3,550 theaters with further help from 400 PLF auditoriums and 377 Imax hubs. The film could hit $30M, but if it doesn’t, that would be due to several reasons. First, it’s the fourth over 25-skewing star-studded thriller to hit the marquee this month, in the wake of The Girl on the Train, The Accountant and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back — all of which opened in the low-$20M range. While U.S. distributors are wiping their brows over the fact that Halloween isn’t directly eating into business like it did last year, when it fell on the weekend, there are holiday celebrations nonetheless, plus the fact that the Chicago Cubs are in the World Series for the first time since 1945.
Critics haven’t been big fans of the Dan Brown movies, but Inferno currently is clocking the second-lowest Rotten Tomatoes score of the three titles with 27%; that’s also a slight wrench in the threequel’s turnstiles. Hanks has been raising the profile of Inferno lately with a guest-hosting gig on a season-ratings high airing of Saturday Night Live and appearing on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, where he acted in a hysterical Big sketch with the late-night host. Further boosting Inferno‘s global ticket sales this weekend are launches in Japan and China.
Hanks reprises his role as Harvard symbology professor Robert Langdon who, together with Dr. Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones), looks to foil a global pandemic by using Dante’s The Divine Comedy as a tool. Earlier this fall, the two-time Oscar winner charted the third-best live-action opening of his career with Warner Bros./Village Roadshow’s Sully ($35M). The first two Brown adaptations — 2006’s The Da Vinci Code ($77M) and 2009’s Angels & Demons ($46.2M) — are the actor’s top openers.
Lionsgate’s Tyler Perry’s Boo! A Madea Halloween looks to have a decent hold because of the holiday, dropping less than 50% with $17M in its second frame. The Jack Reacher sequel will ease an estimated 50% for $11.4M. The Tom Cruise movie was No. 1 on Monday with $1.85M over Madea‘s $1.79M. Current estimated running cume for Jack Reacher 2 is $24.7M, while Madea has $30.3M.
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