Not even Disney is immune to flops. According to reports, The Call of the Wild is set to lose the Mouse House $50 million. With a budget of $125 million, the movie needed to at least double that figure to break even. Through two weeks of release, the Harrison Ford film has earned just under $80 million.
Why this movie needed to cost as much as it did is a mystery. From looking at the trailer, it appears most if not all of the animals, including Buck, the faithful companion to Ford’s character, were entirely CG. And it’s distracting just watching the trailer. I can’t imagine sitting through the entire movie.
What a film earns is all relative. The Call of the Wild had a decent opening weekend for February (just under $25 million) and a 47% drop in its second weekend is better than usual. The reviews are also pretty good with a 62 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But again, it comes down to the budget.
Another recent Disney release, Togo, has a similar plot but used real dogs. It was released on Disney Plus rather than theaters probably because Ford is a much bigger star than Willem Dafoe. But still, I can’t help but think the movie would have been just as good with a real dog interacting with Ford. And cheaper.
It also doesn’t help that the film has yet to be released in Asian markets like China and Japan. Due to the coronavirus, many public places, including movie theaters, have been closed. It will be interesting to see how long this goes on, particularly for a movie like Mulan which has been delayed in China indefinitely. The outbreak is also affecting storytelling as The Falcon and the Winter Soldier may need to be rewritten.
Disney is coming off of their most successful year at the box office. Seven movies earned more than $1 billion at the global box office and that was thanks in large part to Marvel, animation and Lucasfilm.
2020 does not look nearly as profitable. There’s no Star Wars movie coming and the two Marvel films, Black Widow and The Eternals, are a bit of a risk for Disney. We’ll have a better outlook on what kind of year Disney is going to have when Onward hits theaters next weekend, but the tepid box office performance of The Call of the Wild is not a great start to the new year.
from We Got This Covered https://ift.tt/38ceDr3
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