Ghostbusters co-screenwriter Katie Dippold told KPCC's The Frame the film's box office performance could mean a lot for women in Hollywood:
I remember when I was thinking about doing "The Heat," I kept hearing from people, Well, don't pitch that - wait to see how "Bridesmaids" does, or They're just not going to buy any more female comedies. Which is so crazy to me because it was not that long ago, but it's still a question. I feel like there's a lot of pressure right now on the actors. There's just not a great a lot of great starring roles for women out there. So if for some reason that movie doesn't do well, then that actor is back to being the guy's wife with her hand on her hip telling him he's a troublemaker like a bunch of other movies I never want to see again. All I'm trying to do is just help that cause.
That's but one reason why there is more interest than usual in Ghostbusters ' box office. Sony spent $154 million ($144 million after tax rebates) to make and $100 million to market a supernatural comedy in which all the men are idiots and beyond useless and the only way shits get done is when women answer the call. At that budget level and for this genre, this is a precedent-setting movie, one whose success or failure will dictate whether anything like this ever happens again with a predominantly female cast.
Which is why it is so remarkably inconvenient that it's not a very good movie, although there are those who will defend it to the death. Plus, it seems to be playing better with kids than adults. My 8-year-nephew, for example, defiantly told me, "Did I like it? No. I didn't like it - I LOVED IT!"
Yet regardless of the quality of the movie there are those rooting for it to fail, be they men's rights activists or simply children of the 80s and 90s who have finally had enough with Hollywood's recent obsession with sequels, reboots, revivals, "requels" and any other way of making something old new again instead of trying actual original ideas.
Thus far, neither side has probably been totally satisfied. Ghostbusters opening weekend of $46m wasn't fantastic, but it wasn't terrible either. Pretty good for a live-action supernatural comedy, not nearly high enough for a project with a budget akin to a Marvel Studios superhero movie. It was at least a career high for almost everyone involved. However, as is usually the way with Hollywood blockbusters the bigger they open the quicker they fall.
Here's Ghostbusters' updated domestic box office incorporating its second weekend numbers and comparing them to Paul Feig's prior films:
Additionally, its 10-day gross ($86.2m) is identical to The Heat's, and higher than both Spy ($56m) and Bridesmaids ($59.3m). However, that's mostly because Ghostbusters is the most front-loaded of any of Feig's movies. At its current rate of decline it will fall well short of Heat and Bridesmaids, both substantially cheaper movies. In fact, right now it's profiling closer to Adam Sandler's Pixels, as Forbes explained:
[54%]'s a sharp fall for a comedy, and dreams of a 3.8-4x multiplier are now out the window. It's about on par with Pixels and The Boss. So now it's a question of which of those two precedents matches up. It's still looking like a cume of $135m-$150m by the time it's done.
I think we were all hoping for a better second-weekend hold. At least the toys are selling pretty well. Once again, budgets matter. If this film had cost maybe $90m, this would be a very different narrative at work and I don't think anyone would be sweating bullets. But at $144m, with questionable overseas prospects, yeah, I go onward in fear.
Here's where Ghostbusters sits after 10 days, via BoxOfficeMojo:
That includes the $10.5m it took this weekend from foreign markets. It opens in Russia, Germany and a whole slew of other countries in the coming weeks, and hits Japan and France near the end of August. It will not, however, be playing in China. That break-even point of $300m worldwide is not going to come easy, if at all, although that should have been obvious from Feig's track record:
Final note: I am comparing Ghostbusters to Feig's prior movies instead of to the first two Ghostbusters movies because those came out in 1984 and 1989. I don't see much value in looking back that far because the way Hollywood makes and releases films as well as the level of competition presented by other media sources has changed so drastically since then. That being said, if you're curious here are the second weekend drops for the prior Ghostbusters movies: +11.2% for Ghostbusters, -53% for Ghostbusters 2 (pretty much the same as Feig's Ghostbusters).
Source: Forbes
