The “Hail Mary Project” sets records for Amazon MGM and light the way for a revitalization of the box office.
The sci-fi film, starring Ryan Gosling, has grossed more than $300 million worldwide since its theatrical release two weeks ago. This is the best performance ever for an Amazon MGM film.
“The runaway success of ‘The Hail Mary Project’ represents a key turning point for Amazon MGM, giving the distributor its first grossing over $100 million at the domestic box office,” said Paul Dergarabedian, Comscore’s chief market trends officer.
“Project Hail Mary” has held particularly well at the box office since its debut, with only a 32% drop in ticket sales between its first weekend in the United States and its second weekend and a nearly unprecedented 5% drop internationally. A typical Hollywood blockbuster will see a 50-70% drop in ticket sales between opening weekend and the second weekend, after the rush to the theater has died down.
“When Amazon showed off Project Hail Mary at CinemaCon exactly a year ago, it was clear the studio had big plans in mind,” said Shawn Robbins, director of analytics at Fandango and founder of Box Office Theory. “After two incredible weekends so far, the film is a major contributor to the year-over-year box office gains.”
Domestically, the film grossed approximately $165 million, helping to support the first quarter box office figures alongside Disney “Hoppers” and Paramount “Scream 7.” Through Sunday, the domestic box office has totaled $1.75 billion so far this year, up 23% from the same period last year.
In 2022, e-commerce giant Amazon and relatively new film studio MGM have promised to spend about $1 billion each year on theatrical releases, a figure that would fund between 12 and 15 films per year. Last year, the company announced that it had 14 titles planned for 2026.
This surge in movie content is exactly what the domestic box office needs. While blockbuster franchises have been plentiful in the wake of the pandemic, the overall number of large-scale releases has declined over the past decade. Even before Covid and two Hollywood labor strikes slowed production, Hollywood was producing fewer and fewer films each year, according to Comscore data.
At the same time that studios were changing their film schedules, movie theaters were merging. The most recent union between the Walt Disney Co. and 21st Century Fox, first announced in 2017 and finalized in early 2019, resulted in the loss of 10 to 15 film releases per year, according to Comscore data.
The imminent merger of Paramount and Discovery of Warner Bros. makes Hollywood fear even fewer theatrical releases.
Although Paramount has said it is committed to releasing 15 films from each studio, it is unclear whether the combined company will be able to keep up with that type of production.
In the meantime, Amazon appears ready to fill a gap in the schedule.
The company’s upcoming slate is a diverse offering of films: This year, feature films like “The Sheep Detectives,” a murder mystery comedy set to be released in May, the action-packed “Masters of the Universe” set for June and “Verity,” a psychological thriller adapted from Colleen Hoover’s book of the same name, arriving in October.
Like “Project Hail Mary,” based on the book by Andy Weir, “Verity” could benefit from a built-in fan base of readers wanting to see the story translated to the big screen.
“Ultimately, the Hail Mary project is the studio’s new benchmark for what they can accomplish in the world of cinema,” Robbins said. “This is good news for an entire industry still adapting to the tailwinds of shorter windows, consolidation and ever-changing consumer habits. You can bet that every studio, even the oldest, in the industry will be examining the lessons from Amazon’s success with this film. The power of the cinema experience is on full display right now.”
Disclosure: Versant is the parent company of CNBC and Fandango.