As Bridget rules the UK chart for the third week, ahead of new opener Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, we analyse the maths behind such extraordinary audience domination

The winner: Bridget Jones’s Baby

The Bridget Jones’s Baby success story at UK cinemas writes another chapter as the film cracks £30m in just 17 days – the fastest pace ever set for a romantic comedy. Of course, ticket price inflation favours this movie, but it’s worth remarking that 2001’s original Bridget Jones’s Diary had yet to crack £30m after 31 days of release – eventually reaching £42m thanks to a very long tail of cinema play. Three years later, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason was quicker out of the gate, cracking £30m after 24 days of play, on its way to a final tally of £36m.

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The romantic comedy has been rather an orphan genre in recent years, at least in the UK and the US. British variants – 2014’s Cuban Fury and 2015’s Man Up – have seen such disappointing box office that producers and financiers are hardly encouraged to try again. The weepie Me Before You, a £9.6m hit this year, hardly qualifies as an example of the romcom genre, despite some comedic elements and a strong romantic storyline. As for the US, there has really only been How to Be Single this year, which also broke a few rules in the romcom template.

The success of Bridget Jones’s Baby doesn’t really yield many lessons for the film industry, since it’s a sequel featuring a beloved character, which doesn’t help a producer shopping an original romcom script. It does, however, encourage development executives to keep scouring those bookshelves in the hope of discovering a new property with equivalent potential. It’s also another reminder of the commercial potency of the female audience, which continues to be under-served by Hollywood.

Bridget Jones’s Baby has powered an admissions surge for the month of September, traditionally a relatively quiet month for UK cinemas. The monthly admissions data is always slow to be confirmed, but insiders are saying it could well be the strongest September this century, and the busiest since 1997, which was powered by the late-August release that year of The Full Monty.

Bridget Jones’s Baby (£31.35m) has now overtaken Notting Hill (£31.01m) to become the fourth-biggest romcom at the UK box office, behind the previous two Bridget Jones movies and Love Actually. These numbers are not adjusted for inflation.

The runner-up: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Although it couldn’t budge Bridget from the top spot, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children opened with a very creditable £3.36m, or £3.47m including previews. That’s a nice recovery of commercial form for director Tim Burton, after 2014’s Big Eyes (debut of £136,000) and 2012’s Frankenweenie (£742,000 including previews of £156,000). The last time a Burton movie opened bigger was in 2010, with Alice in Wonderland.

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Miss Peregrine has the advantage of familiar source material (the Ransom Riggs novel) and a family positioning – although a 12A certificate and a peril-packed storyline might be red flags for parents of younger children. The story’s setting is primarily in Wales and Blackpool, which is another advantage for the UK release.

The livestream event: Supersonic

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Another week, another event-style release of a music documentary, with Sunday’s presentation of Oasis film Supersonic, together with a livestream Q&A with director Mat Whitecross and executive producer Liam Gallagher. On 8 September, Nick Cave film One More Time With Feeling went out to 156 cinemas, with some repeat showings over the 9-11 September weekend, grossing £343,000. A week later, it was the turn of The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years, which went out on 15 September to 497 cinemas, yielding £597,000 in a single day, and now stands at a robust £926,000.

Supersonic on Sunday grossed £542,000 from 387 venues, which is a nice chunk ahead of its regular release on Friday, when the film will downsize to a more focused 74 cinemas. And because the Sunday screenings are classified just as an event release, and because the regular rollout beginning this weekend swerves the three big circuits Odeon, Vue and Cineworld, distributor eOne is able to release Supersonic on DVD, Blu-ray and digitally within the 16.5-week theatrical window that the major multiplex chains demand. In fact, the home entertainment release is set for the end of this month.

The under-performer: Free State of Jones

When STX Entertainment and IM Global greenlit the $50m-budget American civil war drama Free State of Jones, starring Matthew McConaughey, hopes were high for a major prestige film with awards potential and commercial heft. But the US release in June, delivering just $21m at the box office, put paid to that.

For the UK, American civil war dramas are a tricky sell at the best of times, and distributor StudioCanal really needed some US buzz to give the film liftoff. Absent that, Free State of Jones represented a distribution challenge, despite some admiring reviews including from the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. The UK debut of £119,000 from 226 cinemas might be labelled a disappointment, but expectations had already been shifted significantly downwards.

The personal best: Hell or High Water

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In 2014, when Starred Up grossed £1.5m in UK cinemas, the film represented director David Mackenzie’s biggest ever box office here and his first £1m hit. Over the seven previous feature films, commercial returns for the director had been distinctly patchy. Now Hell or High Water has reached £1.62m, overtaking Starred Up to become Mackenzie’s new best achiever. The film grossed £52,000 at the weekend, and there’s probably another £150-200,000 left in it yet, as it mops up the smaller indie venues.

The future

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Buoyed up by the strong hold of Bridget Jones’s Baby, takings at the weekend were overall 11% up on the previous frame, and also 15% up on the equivalent session from 2015, when The Martian arrived at the top spot. Box office has now been up on the equivalent 2015 weekends for nine of the past 10 frames. Hopes are high that this trend will continue with the arrival today (5 October) of The Girl on the Train, adapted from the Paula Hawkins bestseller. Rival distributors are running scared of the eOne release this weekend, although Warners offers Mel Gibson actioner Blood Father and Icon presents darkly comic US indie War on Everyone, from John Michael McDonagh (The Guard, Calvary). Alternatives include US horror comedy The Greasy Strangler, the regular release of Supersonic, as mentioned above, and Louis Theroux’s first theatrical feature My Scientology Movie. The 13th, the documentary from Selma director Ava DuVernay about US mass incarceration of African Americans, appears simultaneously in cinemas and on Netflix, following festival showcases in New York and London.



Top 10 films September 30 to 2 October

1. Bridget Jones’s Baby, £4,807,165 from 645 sites. Total: £31,350,360

2. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, £3,473,781 from 558 sites (new)

3. Deepwater Horizon, £1,984,340 from 487 sites (new)

4. The Magnificent Seven, £1,004,373 from 540 sites. Total: £4,354,269

5. Supersonic, £542,263 from 387 sites (new, Sunday only)

6. Finding Dory, £365,921 from 478 sites. Total: £41,720,627

7. Kubo and the Two Strings, £320,781 from 486 sites. Total: £2,730,717

8. Don’t Breathe, £220,900 from 220 sites. Total: £3,356,184

9. Bad Moms, £178,511 from 203 sites. Total: £7,977,387

10. MS Dhoni – The Untold Story, £177,441 from 79 sites (new)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mark Wahlberg, right, in Deepwater Horizon. Photograph: David Lee

Other openers

Free State of Jones, £118,886 from 226 sites

Swiss Army Man, £80,403 from 59 sites

The First Monday in May, £31,846 from 15 sites

LORD (Legend of Ravaging Dynasties), £28,147 from 16 sites

Nikka Zaildar, £27,623 from 12 sites

Under the Shadow, £24,392 from 25 sites

Southside with You, £6,184 from 27 sites

The Fencer, £4,202 from six sites

Courted, £2,883 from eight sites

Aandavan Kattalai, £1,908 from one site

Kickboxer, £1,132 from 10 sites

Urban Hymn, £859 from eight sites

Tharlo, £699 from three sites

Amanda Knox, £306 from one site