‘Monster Hunter’ Takes In $2.2M Over Poor Pre-Christmas Pandemic Weekend Before ‘Wonder Woman 1984’

More theaters closed heading into this weekend, including the Boston market and parts of Portland, OR, so there wasn’t much money to make at the box office even with a shiny, new major studio movie, Sony/Screen Gems’ Monster Hunter which is fully respecting the theatrical window. Per industry sources, only 2,300 movie theaters are open in U.S./Canada. Talk about hitting the skids. Couple that with the fact that consumer habits pre-Christmas haven’t changed much during the pandemic –meaning they’re occupied doing other holiday activities, i.e. shopping, etc. instead of going to the movies–and we’re left with very lackluster results here with the Paul W.S. Anderson directed Milla Jovovich feature adaptation of the Capcom vidoegame doing $2.2M, which is much lower than everyone was expecting (meaning $4M+). That said, Sony is looking at the long game of the holiday stretch from this Monday until Jan. 3 when it comes to Monster Hunter.

MONSTER HUNTER: Hollywood social media monitor RelishMix noticed that Monster Hunter had a social media universe near 149M before opening weekend with 30M video views across YouTube with 20.3M owned/earned views, plus Facebook (8.4M). “Awareness of the Capcom game network on social media with cross-promotional materials extends to another 2M+ fans with game special trailers and for characters. There’s an integration of the game audience to Twitch, Sony PS4 and Xbox One and on PCs,” says RelishMix. Another boost here is Jovovich promoting to her near 11M social media followers, but again, this is marketing to the faithful, not the non-moviegoers. TV spending will always trump any kind of digital and social media pushes (which only complement campaigns), and as we said earlier, there wasn’t much of a TV push here for Monster Hunter. Overall, social media chatter was mixed. Earlier this month videogame maker Capcom offered two new limited Event Quests on the game Monster Hunter World: Iceborne tied into the movie.

FATALE: Per RelishMix, Fatale on social, has clocked a moderate reach and engagement with a very low 15M across social platforms, with YouTube at 1.1M views for four videos and reposts and over 1.1M views on Facebook with 15 videos across Lionsgate pages and other earned channels before opening weekend. “Owned pages for the film were started, stopped and restarted given moving dates as materials are being posting in advance of the theatrical date this weekend,” reports RelishMix. Ealy and Swank have been actively pushing the thriller to their combined 3.7M followers.

FULL STORY: https://deadline.com/2020/12/monster-hunter-wonder-woman-1984-croods-2-weekend-box-office-1234659802/