Like Juno and Little Miss Sunshine, Slumdog Millionaire is poised to become one of the top money makers of the season – it’s the keep the costs low, story strong, profits high strategy that works, especially since Danny Boyle didn’t set out to make this year’s Little Movie That Could. It just turned out that way. It’s one of those great surprises. Many that I’ve spoken to believe that Slumdog is the movie to beat this Oscar season, naming it the frontrunner to win Best Picture and Best Director. Here is what Indiewire says about the box office:
It all sounds very familiar. Fresh from hugely favorable screenings at the Toronto International Film Festival, a Fox Searchlight release rides a wave of word-of-mouth that leads to scores of accolades and even more box office. This is the story of 2004’s “Sideways,” 2007’s “Juno,” and potentially, this year’s “Slumdog Millionaire.” As Searchlight continues to slowly expand Danny Boyle‘s Oscar hopeful, it becomes more and more clear that it might have 2008’s specialty powerhouse on its hands.
“Slumdog”‘s $36,002 per-theater-average opening last weekend might have been good enough to lead all of the 2008 fall specialty releases thus far, but it still stood in the shadow of its distributor Fox Searchlight’s biggest hits. In 2004, Alexander Payne‘s “Sideways” averaged $51,760 on four screens in its first weekend, while last year Jason Reitman‘s “Juno” managed a unbelievable $59,124 on seven. Those films ended up with $71 million and $143 million cumulative grosses, and Searchlight must be looking to them now with aspiration.
In its favor is the fact that in this past weekend, “Slumdog”‘s second round, the numbers started to narrow. The film expanded from 10 to 32 screens and grossed $948,606, a $29,644 average. That marks just a 16% drop in per-theater-average. “Sideways” and “Juno” both expanded similarly in their second weekends, jumping from 4 to 16 screens and 7 to 40 screens, respectively. Except they dropped much more significantly. “Sideways”‘s averaged tumbled 52% while “Juno”‘s fell 40%. Perhaps most interesting in “Slumdog”‘s case is that the original 10 theatres in which it opened last week were up 16% on average.
The numbers confuse me but even I can tell that this is good news for Searchlight and Slumdog. In Contention’s Kris Tapley recently told me that it’s an odd year when Danny Boyle and David Fincher are in the Oscar game. What is the world coming to?