Female Ghostbusters

'Ghostbusters' Box Office: Is A $50 Million Weekend A Big Enough Debut?


The first unofficial tracking is in for Sony ’s much-discussed Ghostbusters reboot. The Hollywood Reporter reported (sorry) on Thursday night that Paul Feig’s female-led sci-fi action comedy is looking at an opening weekend of between $40 and $50 million when it opens in North America on July 15. Now we are just under two weeks out from its international rollout and just over two weeks from its domestic debut. Assuming the tracking is entirely accurate as of today, there are any number of things (like good reviews) that can push that number up. But we are in an odd situation where Ghostbusters could become the biggest-grossing film for (nearly) all involved parties and still be a “disappointment.”

Melissa McCarthy’s biggest opening weekend as of today is the $39 million debut of The Heat back in 2013. Her biggest overall grosser is Bridesmaids which made $169m in North America and $288m worldwide. To the extent that Kristen Wiig is a “star,” her biggest live-action opening is the $54m debut of the ensemble sci-fi dramedy The Martian. If you’re counting “Kristen Wiig, box office draw” entries, it’s Bridesmaids again (also her third-biggest live-action debut behind The Martian and Knocked Up). With all due respect, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon aren’t “movie stars,” although they could be after Ghostbusters. Paul Feig’s biggest grossing film is (again) Bridesmaids, followed by Spy ($235m).

The difference is that none of these films cost over $150 million to produce. So we could be in a bizarre situation where Ghostbusters earns well above the $288m worldwide total of Bridesmaids but still ends up a money loser, or at least not big enough to justify franchise extension. That’s the danger of franchise filmmaking. When we talk about the absence of movie stars, but what we really mean is that there are very few would-be movie stars who can open a would-be tentpole by themselves. Would-be peak stardom came from a time when big-budget movies cost $30-$70m, a $10-$30m opening was a win, and movies generally earned many times their opening weekend during a long-ish run.

Comic stars like McCarthy can still do that, but the $150 million question is whether Ghostbusters will significantly outperform her prior (much cheaper and not necessarily franchise-intended) star vehicles. The good news is that even if the tracking is accurate, even at the low end, movies like Ghostbusters tend to have legs because they are often the only game in town for audiences who want a female-led blockbuster-ish offering. And while you might argue that something like Ghostbusters might be a little less leggy than something like Spy, the history don’t entirely bear that out. For example, when Sandra Bullock’s opening weekends started skyrocketing in 2009, the legs for those releases didn’t decrease that much.

In the summer of 2009, The Proposal was Sandra Bullock’s first $20 million+ and $30m+ opening weekend. Yet the Bullock/Ryan Reynolds rom-com still earned $166m on a $33m debut. Ditto The Blind Side (7.5x, although that had an Oscar-winning run), The Heat (4.0x), and Gravity (4.9x its $55m debut, although also an Oscar nominee/winner). The size of the movies went up, the openings went way up (culminating with the $115m debut of Minions last summer), but the legs didn’t wobble. Female-led movies, with the arguable exception of “Young Adult Fantasy Franchise movies,” tend to be leggy as hell precisely because they are often the only game in town.

So if Ghostbusters plays like a conventional mainstream female-targeted movie, it should have legs as well. Presuming a similar pattern, we should remember that both Spy and Identity Thief earned 3.8x their respective $29 million and $34m opening weekends while The Heat earned $159m off a $39m debut. So we could be looking at a $50m opening weekend and a 3.8x multiplier for a $190m cume, or perhaps a $40m opening and a $160m cume. Okay, fine, there is exists a nightmare scenario where Ghostbusters opens with $40m AND has a multiplier on par with The Boss (2.6x), but I really can’t see that happening unless it’s aggressively terrible and/or not kid-friendly.

Heck, I would argue that Walt Disney DIS +1.22%’s Maleficent was aggressively terrible (Angelina Jolie’s performance aside, it’s barely a functioning narrative film), but the fantasy earned 3.47x its $69.4 million weekend in the summer of 2014 and earned $758 million worldwide. Ditto Identity Thief in 2014 ($34m debut/$134m domestic finish). Ditto (the pretty good) Lucy, although that scenario ($43 million debut, 2.8x multiplier for a $122m domestic total) would be a problem unless it plays like the Scarlett Johansson sci-fi thriller overseas as well for a $450m+ total. But Lucy, an original and R-rated sci-fi offering, cost just $40m to produce. Ghostbusters cost over $150m to make, with the intention of revitalizing a franchise and spawning sequels and spin-offs and the like.

That’s where the peril of franchise filmmaking comes into play. A movie like Ghostbusters can’t just be a hit, it has to create demand and excitement for future sequels and spin-offs. That’s the double-edged sword of the whole “star+concept” franchise formula. You get arguably twice the selling power (“It’s Melissa McCarthy… AS a Ghostbuster!”) but usually at double the cost which demands at least double the grosses. What if Melissa McCarthy as a Ghostbuster isn’t really worth that much more than Melissa McCarthy as Susan Cooper? In that case, the hope is that the Ghostbusters brand is enough to make the sell, along with the whole “female-led blockbuster” thing.

Ghostbusters basically needs to be the biggest-grossing movie ever for nearly all of its participants. Between you and me, I think it’ll be okay. But the notion of putting one of our few outright old-school movie stars into a mega-budget franchise, creating a situation where she (and her fellow filmmakers) must clobber their “personal best” records just to break even, is a shining example of the inherent danger of trying to maintain movie stardom in this tentpole era.