Last weekend it was sci-fi vs. sci-fi at the box office, and after several weeks in release, Argo was the #1 film in the country, beating out Cloud Atlas.
Both Argo and Cloud Atlas are thankfully not the usual cookie-cutter movies we usually have to suffer through. While neither film is an easy sell, Argo has been growing with audiences, thanks to strong reviews and word of mouth.
In a day and age where a movie has to make a ton of money opening weekend or else, it’s truly great to see Argo moving up the box office ladder. Cloud Atlas, however, has divided reviewers, who either felt it was a masterpiece or a mess. And at nearly three hours, it’s a lot to take in at one sitting.
Still, we applaud the fact that in this day and age a major studio is willing to roll the dice on a very risky venture like Cloud Atlas when they could just make a tired remake or a sequel instead. Atlas also has a lot of potential with foreign, and home viewing, where you can digest the movie at your own pace.
As Cinema Blend reports, Cloud Atlas cost over $100 million, and only took in $9 million domestic opening weekend. At the same time, The Wrap tells us not to write Cloud Atlas off just yet, even when a movie is branded a flop after a weak opening weekend. Remember, the foreign box office is more important to a film’s success than ever, and there’s hope it will catch on overseas.
The Wrap reports that it could do three times the business foreign than it did in the States.
As one source told the site, “This film doesn’t fit in a box. That can be a positive and a negative. But it is intelligent, complicated and nuanced, and all of that resonated with our foreign investors.”
Interestingly, most of the film’s budget also originated from foreign investors, with Warner Brothers putting up only $20 million to make Atlas.
