THURSDAY NIGHT BOX OFFICE: “Divergent” Solid, Not Overwhelming at $4.9M

• Tweet
• Email

• Tweet
• Email

DIVERGENT (Summit/Lionsgate), in case you hadn’t heard, is purportedly The Next Big YA Thing.  It’s off to a $4.9M start in Thursday night shows that began at 8PM, and that’s a solid but–for this genre–unimpressive number.  YA movies, especially those aimed at young women audiences, are notoriously frontloaded, and back in November 2008, the original Twilight made $7M from midnight shows only.  That was dwarfed by subsequent Thursday night results for the franchise, which peaked with $30.3M for Breaking Dawn Part I.  The Hunger Games launched with a $19.7M Thursday night, and Catching Fire bettered that with $25.3M.

No one expected Divergent to be in a box office league with Hunger Games, but hopes were high that the franchise would start at a level equal to the $69.6M opening weekend for the first Twilight.  This early indication suggests that the weekend may be more like $50-60M, a very good start–and almost certainly leading to profitability for the movie, which will cost about $200M with worldwide marketing included–but not a giant one.  If it follows the trajectory of the Twilight franchise, it can expect around $25M for the Thursday night/Friday combination, than a huge drop on Saturday (the first Twilight fell 41%, and even the Hunger Games movies have dropped 25%).  It may well be that largely lousy reviews (40% on Rotten Tomatoes, compared to 49% for the first Twilight and 84% for Hunger Games) are discouraging crossover audiences.

Note:  MUPPETS MOST WANTED (Disney) also had some Thursday night shows, but they were probably not in the same league with Divergent‘s and haven’t been reported.