Kenneth Branagh’s primarily black and white drama Belfast has spiked at the box office.
Trying to work out what’s going to work in a cinema and what isn’t has become something of a dark art over the last two years. Adult-targeted dramas such as Respect, King Richard, Licorice Pizza and The Last Duel have each struggled to attract bums on seats. Furthermore, even potential surefire hits such as The Matrix Resurrections and The Suicide Squad failed to shift the expected number of tickets. It’s become – outside of primarily superhero films – more of a crapshoot than ever, trying to work out what audiences want to see on the big screen.
Against that backdrop, Universal took quite the gamble programming a 91 minute primarily black and white drama on so many screens in the UK over the last week. And yet Kenneth Branagh’s 19th movie as director, Belfast, has broken through and become a solid hit. Even ahead of expected BAFTA and Oscar nominations for the movie, Belfast sailed into second place on its opening weekend, backed by heavy critical acclaim and a real sense of audience crossover. It’s grossed £2.3m in its first few days in UK cinemas, ahead of fellow opening movie Nightmare Alley, which pulled in just over half a million pounds.
The big money is still going to Spider-Man: Far From Home. That’s taken £87.4m in the UK alone. Likewise, the Scream revival will have crossed £5m by the weekend. But there’s a sense that Belfast will have longer legs on the big screen courtesy of its expected awards success, and its box office triumph is a shot in the arm for smaller budget productions in these uncertain times.
Studios are still being cautious about release dates for their bigger films (the next two Mission: Impossible films have both been delayed for a fifth time, for instance). But still, there’s a hope and sense that – for the moment at least – the worst of the pox might be behind us, and that people are far more comfortable being back in a cinema than they were.
Belfast continues to play around the UK. You can see two of its stars, Jamie Dornan and Caitriona Balfe, talking about the film on the latest episode of whynow Productions’ Sunday Times Culture Show below…
