‘Detective Pikachu’ just scored the biggest opening ever for a video game movie.
Pokémon: Detective Pikachu opened with solid $58 million this weekend. That gives it a promising 2.8x weekend multiplier, even as it earned 9.8% of its opening weekend (slightly high for a kid flick) on Thursday night. Yes, I was hoping it would break out bigger, and yes the soft-ish $41 million opening in China raises an eyebrow or two, but Legendary and Warner Bros.’ $150 million-budgeted comic fantasy just scored the biggest opening weekend ever for a video game movie. It earned $11 million more than the $47 million launch, in 2001, of Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider.
Adjusted for inflation, it’s the second-biggest such launch between Pokémon: The First Movie ($31 million in 1999/$55 million adjusted) and Tomb Raider ($75 million adjusted). That I’m disappointed that it didn’t score way above tracking (like Godzilla in 2014) doesn’t mean it’s a disappointment. We’ve seen a few high profile biggies (Glass, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Aquaman) open right in line with the initial tracking and then leg out. While there was a strong response to the trailers and the goofy viral marketing, the reviews were merely “pretty good” without being superlative.
Yes, it’s the first video game movie to get a “fresh” designation on Rotten Tomatoes, but we weren’t talking raves on par with the first The LEGO Movie which eventually opened with $69 million despite $40 million-plus tracking predictions. The film skewed comparatively young (27% under-18 and 49% under-25), meaning that WB will have to hope that non-chaperone adults decide to check it out over the next few weeks, ideally before WB and Legendary’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters opens on May 31.
For reference, the live-action/animated flick, a kind of Zootopia/Who Framed Roger Rabbit? detective flick (minus the racism parables), stars Ryan Reynolds as the voice of the title character and Justin Smith as the human protagonist who teams with the Pokémon to solve his father’s murder.
