Jason Statham & Guy Ritchie Reteam ‘Wrath Of Man’ Leads Weekend With $8M & A- CinemaScore As Exhibition Looks Forward To Summer

WRATH OF MAN: By the calendar’s measure of recent box office years, it is the first weekend of summer. But because movie theaters are still closed in most of Europe and Brazil because of the pandemic, Disney decided to move Marvel’s Black Widow to July 9.

The good news is that we will finally have a semblance of a summer box office season, unlike last year, and United Artists Releasing is filling the vacancy left by Disney this weekend with the Miramax/MGM production of Guy Ritchie’s R-rated Jason Statham action title, Wrath of Man, which had a solid Friday at the B.O. during the pandemic with $3M (including $500K Thursday previews), then continued on to make the same amount of cash yesterday, and will see a 3-day opening of $8M at 2,875 theaters.

The Wrath of Man trailer launch on March 29 received 22M views and over 48K conversations in its first day. It trended on Twitter and reddit movies, and on YouTube for over 24 hours after launch. The pic’s red band trailer was dropped on April 29 with IGN and Reddit. RelishMix further reports that the viral rate was a solid 9:1, with close to 38M views on YouTube, another 18.2M on Facebook for 27 videos with high posting frequency.

RelishMix is very impressed with the social media on Wrath of Man, reporting “social star power is driving the movie’s social media universe, with 69% of its entire 209.4M footprint. The cast which counts 146M total followers spurred a strong launch over a shortened marketing runway.”

Wrath Of Man’s social media star was, natch, Jason Statham, who counts 100M fans, but Instagram is his preferred outlet at 26.4M. The pic’s other star, Scott Eastwood, counts 5.1M across social media, and he, too, is also posting on Instagram. In his film debut, Post Malone is partially activated on Twitter and Facebook with close to 40M followers, and credited as Austin Post as Robber #6. This behind-the-scenes piece below on Statham’s Instagram has clocked over 4M views:

HERE TODAY: Social media was very light here, considering how the pic was aimed at older audiences. RelishMix noticed before Friday, “With the late re-date pivot into a one-week-ramp-up, the Here Today trailer was dropped on the Sony YouTube channel and another five videos on the Sony studio Facebook. Clearly, making unique pages for the film was skipped with a full Zoom blitz of the cast onto morning and late night talk shows. Trailers on both YouTube and Facebook are equally boosted and quickly approaching 2M views on each platform.”

“Convo from the trailer, theme and casting are mixed-positive-leaning, interwoven with extreme anticipation from Sony YouTube subscribers to the Venon 2 trailer plus,Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Spiderman: No Way Home in their alerts from the Sony YouTube channel (4.6M subs) as movies get back to normal scheduling,” RelishMix adds.

Haddish retweeted to her 559K followers (not so much to her 6.6M Instagram followers) while Crystal has been actively pushing the movie to his 664K Twitter followers.