Sonic The Hedgehog opens strong at the box office
Sonic The Hedgehog shot to the top of the box office this weekend, opening to an estimated US$57 million (1.8 billion baht) in domestic ticket sales — a somewhat unlikely success story for the film, an adaptation of a video game series about a little blue creature with a superhuman sprint.
The movie could easily have been a box-office disaster. Domestic moviegoers haven’t always been particularly kind to adaptations of video games;
Warcraft and Assassin’s Creed, from 2016, and the more recent Tomb Raider reboot, all struggled at the box office. And the creators of Sonic The Hedgehog redesigned the digital title character, delaying the movie’s release, after audiences ridiculed an early trailer.
But Sonic The Hedgehog, distributed by Paramount Pictures and based on the Sega video game character, has more than avoided catastrophe. It brought in an additional estimated $43 million overseas this weekend, according to the studio, bringing its global opening weekend total to $100 million. The movie’s budget was reportedly $85 million.
Directed by Jeff Fowler, Sonic The
Hedgehog pairs its blue, fur-covered hero (voiced by Ben Schwartz) with a human friend played by James Marsden, and pits them against a mustachioed villain played by Jim Carrey. While it may not be the next Parasite,
Sonic The Hedgehog received a fairly warm response from critics, holding a 63% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Ticket buyers seemed to embrace it, too, giving it an A in CinemaScore exit polls. (Ben Kenigsberg, in his review for The
New York Times, was less impressed. “Sonic now resembles a cartoon hedgehog instead of a spray-painted marmot,” he wrote, referring to the character’s digital makeover. “But if anything was done to de-genericise the script, it hasn’t helped.”)
Second place went to Birds Of Prey (Warner Bros), a DC Comics origin story with Margot Robbie that had a disappointing opening last weekend. It continued that course this weekend, bringing in an estimated $17.1 million
in sales, according to Comscore, which compiles box office data.
Two lower-budget newcomers are in a close race for third place.
Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island, a horror movie distributed by Sony, opened to an estimated $12.4 million in domestic ticket sales this weekend, a good start for a movie whose reported budget was around $7 million.
Estimates place it slightly ahead of Universal’s The Photograph, a New York-set romance with Issa Rae and Lakeith Stanfield that also had a good opening this weekend, with about $12.3 million in domestic sales from Friday until Sunday. (That film’s reported budget was $16 million.) Either movie could land in third place when final counts are made.
The weekend’s biggest stumble was probably Downhill (Searchlight), a comedy with Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus that opened to an estimated (and meagre) $4.7 million, landing in 10th place. The movie, a remake of the dark Swedish comedy Force Majeure, had received weak reviews; its Rotten Tomatoes score is 40%. © 2020 THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY