The YA newbie

Never mind the title, The 5th Wave actually arrives as the fourth round of big-budget young-adult adaptations. Twilight broke the market open, The Hunger Games consolidated it, Divergent/The Maze Runner set the formula, and The 5th Wave looks like it could spell YA decline. Surfacing in the wake of Star Wars can’t have been easy for any competing sci-fi film, but $10.7m for sixth place in the US is well below its peers (Twilight, $69m; The Hunger Games, $152m; Divergent, $54m; The Maze Runner, $32.5m). Prudently, Sony haven’t broken the bank for the film, spending $38m on this adaptation of Rick Yancey’s novel, featuring Chloë Grace Moretz searching for her brother in the aftermath of a devastating alien invasion.



But with equally anticlimactic results in key territories like the UK ($710K) and Russia ($2m), it looks doubtful that The 5th Wave will reach even the $300m-ish YA second tier occupied by The Maze Runner and Divergent; the minimum required for a potential franchise to have any serious momentum. Only in Latin America and South America did Sony’s film create an impression, entering at No 1 in 12 out of 13 territories and outperforming all but The Hunger Games, of previous YA debutants. Lots of current studio film-making leans on formula to produce results across a wide spread of territories. But a would-be blockbuster has to be reasonably consistent across the board to be financially sound; The 5th Wave looks like it will fall short. Trotted out in close to 20 films in under five years now, the familiar YA elements – usually a female protagonist, a love triangle, some apocalyptic or sacrificial context – are starting to feel stale. Perhaps the cheaper YA melodrama – à la Fault in Our Stars/Paper Towns – is the way forward.



The double act

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Zac Efron and Robert De Niro in Dirty Grandpa. Photograph: Bob Mahoney/AP

Dual-star casting can work splendidly if the film in question meets the needs of both fanbases. Last year’s Get Hard, for example, combined Will Ferrell’s man-child contingent and Kevin Hart’s black audience to a strong $33.8m US debut and $90.4m overall take. Coupling Zac Efron’s millennial following to increasingly self-parodic cultural heavyweight Robert De Niro for priapic comedy Dirty Grandpa looked like a tantalising bit of business for distributor Lionsgate; De Niro plays a widower who tricks his grandson into taking him to spring break. The $11.5m opening – though probably affected by this weekend’s storms in the US – suggests less than perfect execution. That’s way off 2013’s fellow OAP-shocker Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa ($32m), and short of the best of De Niro’s late-career run of comedies (Analyze This, Meet the Parents, both $18.3m; The Intern, $17.7m). An abysmal round of reviews, as well as renewed puzzlement about what the veteran actor is doing to his filmography, did some damage. But the project looks misconceived on a deeper level: too scatological and youth-orientated to draw in the older audience who might follow De Niro into a more family-tinged comedy like Meet the Parents; too casually misogynistic for Efron’s largely female fanbase. Making De Niro the tearaway and Efron the stick-in-the-mud muddies natural audience allegiances. Nothing wrong with that – but the script has to be up to the job of selling it.



The global comedy star

Like many comedians, Will Ferrell’s appeal was principally regional – ie the US – for a long time. The first Anchorman, whose influence grew quietly over the years until it became perhaps his most loved film, took only 5.8% of its $90m overseas. That’s extreme, but lots of his later hits remained heavily US-slanted, like Blades of Glory, Step Brothers and The Campaign. On release for a month now, his new film Daddy’s Home shows how that has changed. Already on $198.1m and his second highest-grossing pure comedy behind Elf, it is skewing a healthy 30% overseas. That’s the level Ferrell has been maintaining recently, since 2010’s The Other Guys – also a teamup with Mark Wahlberg – broadened his geographic appeal by pushing him into action-comedy. The sequel Anchorman 2, capitalising in 2013 on nicely fermented love for Ron Burgundy, was also running about the same overseas split. He’s lost none of his home-crowd appeal (Daddy’s Home is currently his third strongest US performance, behind Elf and Talladega Nights), but Farrell has undeniable worldwide pull now. With Jim Carrey only intermittently returning to comedy, and Ben Stiller looking to Zoolander 2 to resurrect his 00s heyday, Adam Sandler – with six $100m+ overseas grossers in the last decade, including the much-lambasted Pixels – is probably today’s most bankable global comedy star. But Ferrell and, perhaps, Melissa McCarthy, are developing the consistency to compete.



Beyond Hollywood

If the US had an unremarkable box-office weekend, chilled by the snowstorms, God knows what was going on elsewhere. Only one new non-Hollywood entry made the worldwide chart: Chinese psychological thriller Inside or Outside, down in 19th with $3.5m, featuring Hong Kong stalwart Simon Yam as a detective called to investigate an adulterer who turns out to be a hitman. The Force Awakens, pulled out of Chinese theatres this week to clear the way for the native New Year lineup, will finish its run there with around $115m. A little more than Terminator: Genisys, but a wakeup call for Disney: the reliance on franchise “heritage” didn’t cut it, with steep falls each weekend.



The future

Dreamworks and Fox stick to the infiltration-by-cultural-appropriation method of cracking China with Kung Fu Panda 3 opening simultaneously there this weekend alongside the US (as well as South Korea, Russia and a smattering of former Soviet outposts). The series – with Jack Black still voicing piebald pugilist Po – has been a solid performer globally, taking over $600m for both previous instalments. The sequel, though, increased its overseas takings from 65% to 75%, driven by a big jump in the Chinese haul from $26m to $92m. With number three given full co-production status for the first time in the series, and presumably a huge legup marketing-wise in China, all Dreamworks have to do is avoid any ham-fisted cultural faux pas; they’ve reportedly tweaked the animation for the Chinese version, so the body language better reflects the nuances of Mandarin. Most cunning. Big-screen animation, though, is still not really China’s jam: Pixar continues to struggle there, and no animated film has crossed $200m (compared to nearly 30 in the US).



Top 10 global box office, 22-24 January

1. The Revenant, $49.8m from 49 territories. $223.7m cumulative – 46.7% international; 53.3% US

2. Star Wars: The Force Awakens, $37.6m from approximately 75 territories. $1.94bn cum – 54.7% int; 45.3% US

3. The 5th Wave, $26.6m from 33 territories. $38.1m cum – 71.9% int; 28.1% US

4. Ride Along 2, $19.5m from 20 territories. $69.5m cum – 15% int; 85% US

5. The Big Short, $13.6m from 52 territories. $87.4m cum – 35.1% int; 64.9% US

6. (New) Dirty Grandpa, $13.5m from 14 territories – 14.8% int; 85.2% US

7. Daddy’s Home, $11.2m from 47 territories. $198.1m cum – 29.9% int; 70.1% US

8. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, $9.8m from 1 territory. $33.5m cum – 100% US

9. Creed, $9.5m from 38 territories. $150.2m cum – 27.9% int; 72.1% US

10. The Hateful Eight, $8.9m from 33 territories. $96.1m cum – 46.9% int; 53.1% US

