'Creed II': The Peril and Appeal of Fan Servicehttps://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat- ... cs-1163706Two longtime Rocky viewers ask if this should be Sylvester Stallone's swan song.
[This story contains spoilers for Creed II]
The following is a spoiler-intensive conversation about Creed II that pits The Hollywood Reporter contributors Simon Abrams and Steven Boone against each other for the sake of thinking about how they thought about this particular movie (don't read that sentence three time's fast; once is more than enough).
Box Office: 'Ralph Breaks the Internet' Swipes $84.5M; 'Creed II' KO's 'Robin Hood,' 'Green Book' With $56Mhttps://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ ... od-1163710Michael B. Jordan's 'Creed 2' KO's Box Office With Record-Breaking $55M Debuthttps://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmende ... 173122728eMGM, New Line and Warner Bros.’ Creed II came out swinging over the Thanksgiving weekend. The Steven Caple Jr.-directed sequel to Ryan Coogler’s Creed, which was also a de-facto sequel to Rocky IV, earned a whopping $35.293 million over the Fri-Sun portion of its $55.806m Wed-Sun opening weekend. That’s the biggest debut ever for a live-action release over Thanksgiving, sans inflation of course. And it’s the biggest unadjusted Fri-Sun and Wed-Sun debut ever for a non-Disney release on this specific family-friendly holiday. Oh, and it scored the biggest unadjusted debut for a sports drama and a boxing drama, which of course means it had the biggest debut ever for a Rocky movie. There are nitpicks to be had, but this is a 99.9% total triumph.
Creed II had a comparatively low 4.8x five-day multiplier over the holiday weekend, compared to a 7x multiplier ($42 million from a $6m opening day) for Creed three years ago. Creed earned just 3.5% of its total gross via Tuesday previews ($1.5m), but Creed II earned 6.6% of its weekend total via its previews ($3.7m). To be fair, the sequel was… a sequel. There were plenty of folks who caught up with the first Creed well after opening weekend and then showed up with bells on for the second installment. The “Creed 2 + Rocky 8 + Rocky IV part 2” gimmick enticed folks who might have ignored the movie or merely caught up with it at their leisure as opposed to racing out on opening night.
It isn’t absurd that a film which opens with an opening day 93% larger than its predecessor might be a little front-loaded over the weekend, even with good reviews and an A from Cinemascore. The film still ended up with a five-day opening weekend 31% larger than its predecessor, even if the Fri-Sun weekend ($35m versus $29m) was only 21% larger. Since we’re dealing with a movie that cost around $40 million and thus isn’t counting on an overseas rescue, all of this is mere trivia unless it collapses after the holiday. That’s frankly unlikely since it’s a pretty good sequel despite (or because of?) the silly fan bait premise, and it’ll remain unlike anything else in the marketplace for the rest of the year.
So now the big question is whether it can be leggy enough to pass the unadjusted $127 million domestic total of Rocky IV ($323m adjusted for inflation) to become the biggest Rocky movie ever in raw domestic earnings. If it is merely as leggy as Creed (2.6 x $42m = $110m) or Four Christmases, then it gets to a dynamite $146m domestic cume. But it’s a sequel (to a sequel), to frontloading along the lines of Unbreakable and Spy Games (2x) is not entirely out of the question. That would still give it a $112m gross, which counts as a win in an era when most sequels make less domestically than their predecessors. Yes, those are the two likely extremes concerning reasonable precedents.
A run like The Muppets (rave reviews, an unkillable IP, hardcore nostalgia, a movie technically appropriate for kids that plays to adults, etc.) gets it to $120 million, which frankly smells like the right comparison at the moment. Even if it doesn’t end up with that much more domestically (or worldwide) than the $110m domestic/$173m worldwide-grossing Creed, it’s still proof that the IP is still a big deal. The two-for-one franchise of a Rocky IV sequel and a character-driven, mid-budget, studio-backed drama starring folks who look like Michael B. Jordan and Tessa Thompson (which itself is sadly unique unto itself in the marketplace) was a winning combo. Creed II may not have topped the weekend, but it is an undisputed box office champion.
