First, here are some statistics for you: Blumhouse”s horror-action threequel The Purge: Election Year has a production budget of $10 million. Steven Spielberg”s The BFG has a production budget of $140 million. Guess which movie is doing better at the box office?
It”s a strange world we live in when the latest movie by Spielberg, a director whose films were once almost universally heralded as surefire hits, is being outgrossed by a $10 million genre film, and yet here we are. According to opening-day numbers, The Purge: Election Year is set to top The BFG at the holiday weekend box office, with Deadline estimating a take of $31.5 million over the four-day period. The BFG, meanwhile, is looking at a four-day take of $28 million, while the Alexander Skarsgard adventure reboot The Legend of Tarzan, also opening this weekend, is currently neck-and-neck with the Roald Dahl adaptation.
Deadline notes that the latter films are likely cannibalizing one another”s audiences, suggesting that if only one of them was debuting opposite Election Year, it would easily win the No. 2 slot (Finding Dory is predictably expected to finish at the top of the heap again). Still, with the way things are looking now, a film aimed at a much smaller segment of the moviegoing audience is primed to beat two enormously-budgeted, four-quadrant-ish behemoths (The Legend of Tarzan“s budget is even higher than The BFG“s at a whopping $180 million). That”s a pretty striking fact no matter how you slice it.