‘Home’ Occupies Top Spot At UK Box Office

Ahead of its American debut, DreamWorks Animation’s Home, which will be the studio’s sole theatrical release in 2015, launched in nine territories with a solid $19.2 million.

Home’s strongest market was the Cinderella-less United Kingdom where it opened in first place with $9.3 million. While that figure lags behind the UK wide-release of DreamWorks’s How to Train Your Dragon 2, which netted $13.3M in a weekend, it’s significantly better than Penguins of Madagascar, which had a soft $2.5M bow in the market last December.

Home also debuted in the top spot in Russia ($4.2M) and Spain ($2.4M), and in second place in Australia ($2.3M). The Tim Johnson-directed Home expands into over 50 territories this week including North America.

In the United States, with the grittier heroine of the YA dystopian franchise sequel Insurgent taking the spotlight in cinemas this weekend, Disney’s Cinderella has slipped to a respectable second spot in its second frame, making an estimated $34.5 million overall and bringing the domestic total to an estimated $122 million.

In the context of Disney’s remakes and reimaginings, the 49.2% drop is nearly the same as Maleficent’s second-weekend drop last year of 50.6%. Alice in Wonderland and Oz the Great and Powerful dropped 46% and 47.9% in their second weekends, respectively.

Another consideration for the calculus: Maleficent’s revisionist take on Sleeping Beauty had a production budget of $180 million; Kenneth Branagh’s decidedly non-revisionist Cinderella had a comparatively lean $95 million. (Alice in Wonderland and Oz the Great and Powerful cost $200 million and $215 million, respectively.)

Cinderella’s foreign total currently sits at $131 million (including $52.4 million from China), with a worldwide total of $253 million.

Meanwhile, Paramount Animation’s The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water is continuing to prove highly absorbent in 10th position with $2.4 million in its 7th U.S. weekend and a $158.8 million domestic total. Internationally, it has earned $121.2 million, lifting its global take to $280 million.