Well, looks like nobody will go broke making Middle-earth movies. The third of Peter Jackson’s films based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” squeaked past $800 million earned world-wide last weekend. Jackson can get on with his “Tin Tin” movie and maybe my wish that he will write and direct a World War I zombie film with 100 percent practical effects in conjunction with Weta Workshop can happen. Maybe not.
But it is time to take a little peek at the box office and see how things are going. If you didn’t hear, another Warner Bros. movie, “American Sniper” assassinated the January box office records in the U.S. while the final Hobbit film slid to eighth place after 30-some days of release. Rentrack tells us it made $4 million on the weekend for a grand total of $244,537,115 domestic. It isn’t quite done, so lets call it $250 million but it will be closer to $260.
Meanwhile, overseas, from 63 territories, it has taken $558,600,000. (Speaking of “Taken” the third one of those movies just made an avalanche of money – see gold pile above – so go ahead and bet on number four. With every new sequel, a legion of devils get their wings; but Hollywood doesn’t care.)
One big market, a dragon of a market if you will, China, hasn’t opened the film yet and so that non-U.S. total is expected to reach past $700 million. This puts Jackson’s final Middle-earth movie very close, but not over $1 billion. Now, it is nothing but an arbitrary mark and a game, but something satisfies our lizard brains to know the film made 1/28th of what Bill Gates has donated to charity.
Can China and the rest of the world world push their share to $750 million or beyond? This film was tracking ahead of the previous one, that finished just more than $700 million, so it is going to be very close, but I can’t find the complete data and my bed calls. More updates in a week – or two.
