I looked at my screening invite for Home last week and thought “Home? What the hell is Home?” Then today I saw that Home had grossed an estimated $54 million domestic and $102.2 million including international numbers, and I thought “Home? What the hell is Home?” Turns out it’s a Dreamworks Animation movie featuring the voices of J Lo, Rihanna, and Jim Parsons from Big Bang Theory, and it doesn’t matter if a one-word common noun title seems completely forgettable to you or me, the kid market is strong. By the way, I just watched the trailer and already I want to know, “Home? What the hell is Home?”
Elsewhere, it would be accurate to say that Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart’s R-rated buddy vehicle Get Hard got crushed by a kids’ movie, but just as accurate to say that it still opened big, earning $34 million on a film that only cost $40 million to make. So yes, expect Kevin Hart to continue starring in every film. Despite the big opening, audiences gave it a mediocre B cinemascore, to go along with its 31% RottenTomatoes recommended rating. I swear, it wasn’t Kevin Hart’s fault. It felt like it got greenlit based on a two-sentence pitch and then had to shoot without a script.
While many critics were hard on Home, audiences gave it an A CinemaScore, guaranteeing good word of mouth. Home’s voice cast also includes Jennifer Lopez and Steve Martin. It skewed heavily female (60 percent), while 57 percent of the audience was under the age of 25. Caucasians made up 48 percent of the audience, followed by African-Americans at 22 percent.
“Home is a return to the quality that DreamWorks Animation is known for,” said Fox domestic distribution chief Chris Aronson, noting that the movie will do brisk midweek business because of spring break. Not only that, there isn’t another animated film until Pixar’s Inside Out on June 19. [HollywoodReporter]
Ha, DreamWorks is known for characters raising one eyebrow and for being the store-brand knock-off version of Pixar, in that order.
[Get Hard] will be Kevin Hart’s second-biggest star vehicle opening behind the $41m debut of Ride Along and it will be Will Ferrell’s fifth-biggest opening behind The LEGO Movie ($69m), Talladega Nights ($47m), Megamind ($46m), and the $35.5m debut of The Other Guys. So yeah, if you’re only counting live-action stuff, then Will Ferrell just nabbed his third-biggest opening weekend ever. If you want to play the inflation game, it’s still in the upper realms, behind only Talladega Nights, Elf, Anchorman, and Blades of Glory. [Forbes]
Blades of Glory, who knew.
Meanwhile, It Follows opened in 1218 theaters, widest ever for Radius-Dimension, grossing $4 million. Which is great, because there’s no reason It Follows couldn’t play in as many theaters as your Paranormal Activities. If enough people saw it, who knows, maybe people would even start demanding better from their horror movies. I mean probably not, but we can all live in film critic fantasy land for a few minutes.
Next week brings us Furious 7, and I will be shocked if it makes less than $90 million. Vin Diesel will celebrate by posting a picture of himself staring at a sunset on Facebook, with a caption about how blessed he is, vaguely alluding to it all being because of Paul Walker looking down on us all. You know this to be true.