Glass is a $20 million-budgeted, self-financed, distribution-only flick that just nabbed a $40.5 million Fri-Sun/$48.06m Fri-Mon debut weekend. Yes, it’s a sequel, it but it’s a sequel to what began as a wholly original genre flick and a sequel to a genuine cult favorite. So, to the extent that this opening feels anything like a disappointment, it’s mostly a matter of potentially unrealistic expectations, concern for long-term grosses and what its critical reception means for the guy above the title. There’s a lot of context to discuss, but for the record, this is a $20m superhero flick that just nabbed a $90m global opening weekend, which is a record global bow for M. Night Shyamalan. Even if it is as frontloaded as Watchmen or Green Lantern, it will make money for all parties.
Universal/Comcast, which distributed Glass in North America, swore that it wouldn’t open any higher than $50 million for the four-day weekend, and they were correct. A $48m launch is close to the projection, and I’d argue that reviews (36% rotten and 5.1/10 on Rotten Tomatoes) and word-of-mouth (a B from Cinemascore) were to blame. There is nothing wrong with how the movie was presented or how it was marketed, other than, like WB’s Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald trailers, it tricked me into thinking the movie would be good. That Glass opened to the same as Split (a $40m Fri-Sun launch in 2017) and Unbreakable ($32m Fri-Sun/$46m Wed-Sun in 2000) shows that perhaps the fan base for both IPs was almost entirely overlapping.
That tracking led various outlets to hope for a debut closer to $70 million over the holiday weekend is merely a case of tracking being wrong. The pre-release results are, as always, not intended to be an ironclad prediction but rather a tool for studios to adjust their marketing right before opening day. Sometimes, the tracking says that Solo is going to open with around $170m over a Fri-Mon debut weekend (it actually nabbed $103m) and sometimes it says that The Upside is going to open with $12m (it nabbed $20m last weekend). Like Aquaman and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Glass may just be a case where the pre-release buzz (be it positive or negative) didn’t really move the needle over those final three weeks.
That it still nabbed the third-biggest MLK Day weekend debut ever (behind Ride Along’s $41 million Fri-Sun/$48m Fri-Mon launch in 2014 and American Sniper’s $89m Fri-Sun/$107m Fri-Mon wide expansion in 2015) despite the mixed-negative buzz shows the inherent interest in the property and the marquee value of its director. Even during the “dark years,” M. Night Shyamalan’s movies never really stopped making money. The Happening earned $161m on a $48m budget, The Last Airbender earned $300m global on a $150m budget and The Village earned $256m worldwide on a $60m budget. His only outright flops were Lady in the Water ($72m on a $70m budget) and After Earth (which was famously sold sans his name in the marketing and earned $256m but on a $130m budget).
There was hope/expectation that positive buzz heading into the weekend would push the opening weekend upward accordingly, but the reviews were mixed-negative and the buzz was less-than-positive. And there was a hope that Glass would play like a breakout sequel to Split, as the 2017 James McAvoy/Anya Taylor-Joy thriller had surprisingly good reviews, a surprisingly large opening weekend and surprisingly long legs fueled both by the film’s twist epilogue (which leads directly to Glass) and younger audiences just enjoying the hell out of Split sans the Unbreakable connection. The $9 million-budgeted (and self-financed by Shyamalan) film earned $137m domestic and $276m worldwide for Universal, becoming Blumhouse’s biggest global grosser just a month before Get Out earned $176m domestic to become their biggest domestic earner.
This is not a breakout sequel. Blame the reviews and mixed word-of-mouth, but also blame the possibility that the online anticipation for an Unbreakable sequel was not remotely representative of the general audience interest. It’s possible that the movie may have turned off both (admittedly overlapping) fan bases. Unbreakable fans may be annoyed that it is essentially a Split sequel with a few Unbreakable characters and Split fans may be annoyed that Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson are interfering with their Split follow-up. Shades of Alien: Covenant are to be found, where Prometheus topped $400 million worldwide but Ridley Scott then made a Prometheus 2 which was presented as more of an Alien prequel for a franchise that hadn’t a stand-alone hit since 1986.
Like Watchmen (a 2.5-hour, R-rated superhero melodrama that opened with $55 million ten years ago) and Green Lantern (which, despite horrible reviews and poor buzz, still snagged a $53m launch), I view the otherwise superb opening of Glass with a little side eye because I am presuming that the movie will be very frontloaded. It was in the movie’s interest to make as much as possible in those first few days. Both above-noted WB superhero flicks earned over/under 2x their respective opening weekends, and (obvious budget differences notwithstanding) I cannot help but look at Glass and see Cloverfield. That Paramount/Viacom monster movie rode a wave of buzz from its top-secret viral marketing campaign for a $40m/$46m MLK debut in 2008. It ended up with $80m domestic.
I’m expecting Glass (which is being distributed overseas by Walt Disney and has already earned $48m overseas) to do better worldwide than Cloverfield ($170 million), and even Cloverfield cost $25m. That I was expecting/hoping for a performance on par with Split (and a quality closer to Signs than The Last Airbender) does not make Glass a failure if it ends up closer to $200m than $300m worldwide. This may be a case like we saw with Ted 2, Neighbors 2 and Now You See Me 2, where an original so vastly overperforms that its follow-up merely performing about as well as we expected for the first one feels like a disappointment. Just because Split nabbed a $40m launch despite tracking suggesting a $25m launch doesn’t mean Glass has to outperform its pre-release projections.
There’s a lot of “maybe/possibly” here, including the possibility that The Upside will be January’s biggest domestic earner. But a $20 million sequel to a $9m horror title and a $75m-budgeted cult superhero flick just earned $89.1m in its worldwide opening weekend. As a die-hard Shyamalan fan/apologist (I’ll even defend The Happening), I wish the movie wasn’t such a letdown. As a box office pundit, I believe that better reviews and better buzz would have led to a bigger opening. But Glass will quintuple its budget by Monday. That’s a win. I don’t know what the film’s reception (and likely frontloading) means for M. Night Shyamalan’s career, but as long as he keeps his budgets under $25m, it’s a moot point.
The other only newbie this weekend (yes, even rival studios thought Glass would open a bit bigger) was FUNimation's Dragon Ball Super: Broly which shocked us all with a $7 million opening Wednesday on 1,250 screens (shades of when WB's Pokemon: The Movie earned $10m on its opening Wednesday in November of 1999). The animated feature, which is obviously playing hard to the dedicated fanbase, earned $3.3m on Thursday (topping the box office on its first two days) and another $10.6m over the weekend (on just 467 screens over the Fri-Sun frame) for $21m since Wednesday. Yes, it peaked on opening day, but this is still a bonkers performance for a movie that wasn't really on anyone's radar. I wish I had more to offer, but neither I nor my son have much knowledge in the realm of Dragon Ball Z and its multi-decade mythology.
