…with “Where The Wild Things Are”. So far so good with close to $40m recouped from just over 3,700 engagements for the week. That’s a little over $10,000 per screening in it’s first week. Those aren’t huge numbers by any means but looking back at where “Wild Things” has come from has Warner Bros. and a couple of outside investors breathing a sigh of relief. After myriad delays and quagmires, ‘Wild Things’ stayed in production for years without getting the green, and when it did get the go ahead it was destined to come in over budget. Final tallies have it at around the $90m to $100m dollar mark.
If all continues to go well, Warner Bros. will only get about a quarter of the profits as they tried to distance themselves early on from the project by finding two outside investors who put up the remaining 75%.
Initial test screenings had kids, under 8 at least, running out in tears, not expecting the darkness of the movie which left adults loving it. Even those that didn’t have kids. The true success of “Wild Things”, despite an excellent job by Max Records and the rest of the cast: Catherine Keener, Mark Ruffalo, Lauren Ambrose, and James Gandolfini, may lie with Warner Bros. marketing chief Sue Kroll, who almost single-handedly discovered an audience for “Where the Wild Things Are,” a family movie that turns out might not be too much of a family movie after all.
Popularity: 75% [?]
