‘The Call Of The Wild’ Barks Up $1M, ‘Brahms: The Boy II’ Sees $375K – Thursday Night Previews

Disney/20th Century Studios feature adaptation of Jack London’s Call of the Wild drew $1M last night from 6PM previews while STX’s horror sequel Brahms: The Boy II saw $375K at roughly 1,800 theaters last night. They’re the two wide entries in a post Presidents Day weekend which will see Paramount’s Sonic The Hedgehog the winner with $29M-$40M in weekend 2.

Last night Sonic made an estimated $2.55M, -4% from Wednesday, ending week 1 with a fantastic $80.3M.

The Call of the Wild, starring Harrison Ford and Karen Gillan, and directed by Chris Sanders, was in development before the Disney-Fox merger, and repped a revived strategy by Fox when it was under Stacey Snider to head more aggressively into the animated space post Blue Sky’s Ice Age movies, and an effort to emulate the live action-CGI hybrids like Disney’s Jon Favreau movie The Jungle Book. The pic we hear was greenlit at $135M, shot here in California, but even with a projected $17M-$20M domestic take, the studio will look to overseas for a bailout. Still, this is an Americana story, and that’s not apt to translate. Call of the Wild opens day and date in most of the world sans Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Argentina, Venezuela, Finland, South Africa, and, of course, China which continues to have a shuttered exhibition infrastructure in the height of the coronavirus. Call of the Wild‘s Rotten Tomatoes score is at 65% fresh, which is meh for this PG-rated film.

Brahms The Boy II, rated PG-13 and directed by William Brent Bell, follows the continuing terrors of the life-like-doll, Brahms, after a family movies into the Heelshire Mansion and doll and young boy make friends. Estimated opening is in the mid-to-high single digits at 2,151 theaters. STX claims that they have a $3M exposure on this $10M movie given their foreign pre-sales model. Eight reviews currently on RT are registering at 0%. The first 2016 movie, made for $10M, opened to $10.7M stateside and finaled at $35.8M, $74.1M WW. At those numbers, the movie got a sequel.

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