'Challengers' Wins a Slow Box-Office Weekend

Zendaya's tennis drama Challengers had a decent debut weekend considering that it has none of the splashy spectacle that moviegoers love. But it does have a big production budget to recoup, and its $15 million weekend take means that it's almost certainly not going to turn a profit in theaters. It performed well enough, though, to easily outdistance last week's top movie, Civil War, which is fading quickly after three weeks of release. Read on for details.

Via Variety.

Game, set, now what to make of this match?

“Challengers,” a sexy, subversive, R-rated drama set in the world of tennis, easily took first place at a sluggish domestic box office this weekend with $15 million from 3,477 locations. On one hand, it’s a respectable result for an artsy movie aimed at discerning, adult audiences, but what keeps it from being a championship performance is that “Challengers” has a hefty $55 million budget (to say nothing of its marketing costs). The Amazon MGM Studios release will need strong word-of-mouth if it’s going to keep rallying — and next week brings Universal’s “The Fall Guy,” a Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt action-comedy that marks the start of summer blockbuster season. The competition only stands to get fiercer from here.

Amazon MGM would probably argue that “Challengers” doesn’t need to be a box office phenomenon in order to be successful. The higher profile that comes with a theatrical release will lift “Challengers” when it debuts on Prime Video, Amazon’s streaming service, and sets it up nicely for other home entertainment revenue streams, or so the thinking goes. Those revenues and that viewership data go largely unreported or are spun within an inch of their life, so it’s getting harder to know what constitutes a true win in this new streaming era. Kevin Wilson, the head of theatrical distribution at Amazon MGM Studios, said he expects that the film will score with Prime Video subscribers, comparing it to “Saltburn,” the steamy drama that the company released last fall which went on to be among its most-watched streaming releases.

“This movie is going to way over-perform when it gets on our platform,” he said, noting that the theatrical revenues are essentially helping to off-set “Challengers'” marketing costs. “Amazon’s financials are a little bit different in terms of comparing them to other studios,” Wilson added.

That’s certainly true, and with its $1.87 trillion market cap, Amazon can afford to take a bet on something like “Challengers” even if its ticket sales are unlikely to fund Jeff Bezos’ next space excursion. Just look at how the major media conglomerates compare to the e-retailer behemoth — Warner Bros. Discover has a market cap of $19.79 billion, Disney’s stands at $206.78 billion and Comcast’s hovers at $153.19 billion.

Some veteran box office sages aren’t on board for this new “trust us, it’s a hit” approach to Hollywood economics now that tech giants like Apple and Amazon have crashed the party. “Everybody is using this same line that the box office will propel viewership and you can’t say this is a miss,” notes Jeff Bock, an analyst with Exhibitor Relations. “And they all use this obscure downstream revenues verbiage. But when seen in terms of decades of box office numbers, something like ‘Challengers’ seems middle of the road to me.”

Get the rest of the story at Variety.