Terminator: Genisys Box Office Watch

Updated 3x: Terminator: Genisys has had its Chinese box office opening.  It scored $26 million, give or take, to reach a current worldwide total of $350 million.  At this rate, the movie would be lucky to break even.  Considering that the movie was awful, even if it did break even, that would not be enough to warrant a sequel.  For instance, Fury Road, while not the biggest success ever, had hugely popular reviews going a long way to bankroll its sequel.

Updated 2X:  Box office mojo has the takings for Terminator: Genisys, internationally, at around $228 million, with $75 of that being domestic.  This is a certified bomb considering that the studio/investors will not pick up 100% of the money outlined here.  It doesn’t work that way.  So given that the budget (all in) is north of $200,000,000 and that they take less than 60% of the domestic take, and even less again of that from international markets, Terminator: Genisys was a marketing failure and a critical one to boot.  The movie is sitting at a pitiful 26% on Rotten Tomatoes.  For all involved, you could call this a disaster.

Updated:  Forbes has given an update on this for Friday.

“Terminator Genisys continued to make its own grim fate. The Arnold Schwarzenegger sequel earned $10.8 million on Friday, which brought its cume to $26.55m and set the stage for a $28m Fri-Sun and $42m Wed-Sun holiday debut. I know I tend to try to find the positive in almost any big weekend debut, but this is frankly a (domestic) disaster for the very expensive Paramount/Viacom VIAB -0.63% Inc. sequel”

Original: Terminator: Genisys has opened for a long ‘weekend’ and the first numbers are in for its opening day.  $9 million is the first figure that comes in from Wednesday night for North America, which actually includes Tuesday as well.  So since Tuesday was $2.3 million, this puts Wednesday technically at $6.7 million.

That is for over 2,500 locations, IMAX and 3D.

It’s a terrible opening and indicative of a box office bomb and the worst drawing Terminator movie yet.  Word of mouth isn’t going to help over the full ‘weekend’ either, in fact it may worsen the situation since the movie is, y’know, fucking terrible.  Back in January when we put a review up of the screenplay, we said as much.  This is also a movie where Rotten Tomatoes and the like are not vested in putting a slant on things, no pressure there.  It’s a movie with multiple investors and not some Marvel property, metric sites will let the chips fall as they are.

Word of mouth will take any legs from this movie, the opposite of what happened with manliest movie of the year so far, Mad Max: Fury Road, which opened relatively so-so, but came back swinging.

So this will be an interesting box office watch, we will see whether or not cynical whoring out and the worst of Hollywood’s habits gets punished and if it does, just how bad…