Well, the box office results from this weekend are in, and they didn’t look good for Lin-Manuel Miranda and company.
His highly anticipated musical, “In The Heights” only brought in $11.4 million. It wasn’t even the number 1 movie over the weekend. That honor belonged to “A Quiet Place Part II” (story HERE).
Few critics argued over how good the film was. It’s a strong musical (post HERE) but this post pandemic box office return continues to be mostly unpredictable.
Really, I thought “The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It” would hold on for another week, but it dropped to 4th. Even the enjoyable “Peter Rabbit” sequel snuck into the top three instead. All four films were less than $2 million apart.
Here is why “In The Heights” didn’t succeed like we thought it would.
That dog-gone HBO Max same day release arrangement: HBO releasing some of it’s big titles the same day on it’s streaming services hasn’t hurt all of it’s films, but King vs. Godzilla demanded to be seen in the theaters. To a lesser extent, so did “The Conjuring”. “The Heights” didn’t have the built in fan-base and the mildly curious watched it at home for dozens of dollars less.
Musical still aren’t for everyone: It’s true. While the talent in this film is indisputable, ticket buyers won’t shell out high prices to see it. Musicals hit differently with everyone.
That running time: One of the few things actually wrong with the movie was that two and a half hour running time. Mix that with our next factor and that’s not a good thing.
Lack of star power: Fans didn’t have a big star or franchise to float their money on here. And while it doesn’t always mean a poor showing, this time it did.
Let’s hope the movie can have a long, stable run, and ultimately turn it around. It wasn’t an ultra expensive film, all is not lost for fans.