Lionsgate's Lousy Week, 'Coraline's 'Avatar'-Sized Box Office And More

Paramount goes (sonic) boom with a 'Sonic the Hedgehog 3' trailer while I discuss the perils of treating 'Anaconda' as an inherantly valuable IP.

In tonight’s comparatively only somewhat long-winded newsletter…

• Paramount’s first Sonic the Hedgehog 3 trailer teases Keanu Reeeves’ Shadow. (free)

• Coraline is pulling reissue grosses on par with all-time box office champions. (free)

• Can Jack Black and Paul Rudd concoct something fun for those who don’t care about ‘Anaconda’? (paid)

• Some tough love after Lionsgate’s very bad week… (paid)

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 trailer goes last.

I spent months telling my 13-year-old son we’d get a Sonic the Hedgehog 3 trailer timed to the September 20 release of Paramount’s (surprisingly good… believe the hype) Transformers One. But… yeah, debuting it just in time for the opening weekend of WBD’s Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice (a film that might open with around $100 million domestic) works, too.

This marks the final “first look” trailer for any of the year’s big deal tentpoles. It’s amusing the extent to which we’ve had “Where is the damn trailer already?” discourse when even today marks just under four months until the December 20 release date. I am amused that this threequel uses the plot we usually see with sequels, namely that the hero (Ben Schwartz’s Sonic) and the villain (spoiler: Jim Carrey’s Dr. Ivo Robotnik survived Sonic 2) must team up to stop an even more significant threat.

So, Sonic 3 is the Blade II of the Sonic series? I’m sorry, but the threequel is supposed to be where the hero is (to varying degrees) stripped of their powers, gadgets and resources, exiled to a far-off locale and forced to prove that they are still a hero without all their toys or respective advantages. Surely Thor: Ragnorak, Rocky III, Toy Story 3, Alien 3, The Dark Knight Rises, Cars 3, Star Trek Beyond, Iron Man 3 and Skyfall wouldn’t lie to me, right?

As teased since the end of the 2022 sequel, the bad guy is Shadow, voiced by Keanu Reeves. He offers himself up as a tortured contrast to our fellow hedgehog traveler. We can expect, not unlike the second film’s arc with Idris Elba’s delightful himbo Knuckles, a nature versus nurture conflict. We’ll see if he’ll get redeemed at the end and/or if the Eggman (since surely Carrey isn’t in this for the long haul) goes out in a blaze of glory. What’s worth noting, aside from how much I enjoy Knuckles’ deadpan dickery, is how little face time the humans get.

Aside from Carrey’s big return, James Marsden’s Tom gets an introductory moment alongside a single "in mortal danger” beat (I’m guessing Tom isn’t going to croak). Otherwise, it’s all about the marquee characters. I hope Jeff Fowler and friends remember that part of why the first two films worked was due to the non-IP entertainment value provided by (among others) James Marsden and a scene-stealing Natasha Rothwell. Even the Knuckles Paramount+ miniseries benefited from letting Knuckles interact with entertaining-unto-themselves humans played by the likes of Carey Elwes and Stockard Channing. Still, they reacted to Sonic 1 by giving Rothwell her own subplot in Sonic 2, so… benefit of the doubt.

Sonic the Hedgehog surprised in February of 2020 by being surprisingly decent, working as a kid-friendly adventure fantasy first and a video game adaptation/IP exploitation second. It earned $307 million worldwide on an $85 million budget just before Covid shut down theaters (and the world). The just-as-enjoyable Sonic the Hedgehog 2 earned $405 million worldwide on a $110 million budget in April 2022. Will this threequel, which has earned goodwill from its predecessors, be the first live-action video game flick to top $500 million worldwide? There’s room enough over the Christmas season for Sonic 3 and Mufasa: The Lion King, but Barry Jenkins’ sequel/prequel is the one with something to prove.

Coraline keeps on Coralining…

After a jaw-dropping $12 million Thurs-Sun “debut,” the 15th-anniversary reissue of Laika’s Coraline kept on keeping on. It earned another $5 million (-48%) in weekend two and $538,000 on Monday (-67% from last Monday) to bring its domestic cume to $26 million. Even if the momentum is running out, although it’s not like this upcoming holiday weekend is filled with big kids’ flicks, the film’s domestic total could be flirting with $30 million by Labor Day. How big is that for a domestic reissue? It’s probably even bigger than you might initially guess.

It’s double what Star Wars: The Phantom Menace earned ($13.5 million) amid its 25th-anniversary reissue this past May, and it’ll be around triple what Spider-Man: No Way Home earned ($9 million) in its end-of-summer 2022 reissue. It’s bigger than any of the two domestic rereleases of Avatar ($11 million in 2010 and $25 million in 2022) and well above the 25th-anniversary reissue of Titanic ($15 million) in early 2023. We haven’t had a total this big since the early 2010s wave of 3-D enhanced reissues.

The Lion King returned to theaters in September 2011 with a 3-D conversion and opened with a jaw-dropping $32 million before legging out to $94 million domestic and $186 million worldwide. That was, by a healthy margin, the top earnings for such a thing since the early 1997 rerelease of the Star Wars special editions, which earned (domestically) $138 million, $67 million and $45 million in early 1997.

Disney's success led to a brief “trend” of 1990s blockbusters returning to wide theatrical release with a new 3-D transfer. Beauty and the Beast, Phantom Menace and Jurassic Park each earned an additional over/under $45 million in North America in 2012 and 2013. Titanic set sail again in early 2012, in “honor” of the 100th anniversary of the ship’s sinking, and grossed another $58 million domestically and $350 million worldwide.

Jurassic Park and Star Wars I both used the 3-D reissues to crawl past the $1 billion mark globally. Titanic raised its total to $658 million domestically and $2.3 billion worldwide to conveniently put some “Nice try, fucker!” distance between itself and The Avengers ($623 million/$1.5 billion just months later). Anyway, this all went down from September 2011 until April 2013. After that point, we started seeing reissue grosses closer to the over/under $3.5 million earned by Top Gun 3-D in early 2013 and Terminator 2 in August 2017.

This is a long-winded way of saying that Coraline's current total of $39 million worldwide is remarkable. It has sold more tickets in Mexico (over 1.6 million) than in its initial theatrical engagement. It is the second-biggest rerelease ever in the United Kingdom, between E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and (of course) Titanic. Fun fact: E.T. and Titanic each spent time as the all-time biggest-grossing movie at the domestic and global box office. Coraline earned “just” $125 million worldwide in early 2009. To say she’s punching way above her weight would be an understatement.

As far as Fathom Events, it has sold around 2.2 million tickets to become their biggest-grossing release, flying past the $17 million cume for The Blind last year. Oh, silly trivia, it may earn around half of what the various The Chosen releases have earned combined ($70 million). I won’t say that Coraline is bigger than Jesus, but you are welcome to.

As previously discussed, does this mean audiences just wanted to see Coraline 3-D in a theater? After all, I’d argue that it’s the best 3-D animated film (not the “best animated film released in 3-D”) ever made. Or, god willing, are we about to see a kind of generational nostalgia from the 2010s generation that grew up on Coraline, ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, Kubo and the Two Strings and The Missing Link? Wildwood has yet to procure a distributor, so we’ll see which studio (A24? Lionsgate? Neon?) ends up with what could be (relatively speaking) a comparative overperformer.

Or maybe it’s just that everyone loves Coraline. We’ll (hopefully) find out sooner rather than later.