Small Willie style

$31.3m for a 32-territory rollout featuring a big name, supposedly one of the hallowed few able to open a film singlehandedly is not good form. Will Smith’s conman thriller Focus, co-starring Wolf of Wall Street bombshell Margot Robbie, has already been positioned as a lowering of expectations for the box-office main man after the disappointment of 2013’s After Earth, which limped on a $130m budget to $243.8m worldwide. So let’s not use the blockbuster measuring chart – on which Smith has marked some lofty notches, including Independence Day’s $817.4m ($1.2bn corrected for inflation) – to size up his new venture.

A more suitable comparison point, however, illustrates why the 46-year-old Smith’s star lustre may be fading. The 2005 romantic comedy Hitch, placing Smith in a similar svengali role opposite Eva Mendes, opened to $43.1m in the US (vs Focus’s $19.1m) and went on to an eventual $368.1m globally. Focus, on the strength of its first outing, looks unlikely to get there. The large disparity in the American numbers is especially glaring, and After Earth’s weak $60.5m US total also suggests that the home crowd might be tiring of a prince who hasn’t displayed much freshness since 2008’s hobo superhero, Hancock. A No 1 $3.1m debut for Focus in Russia, nearly double Hitch’s $1.8m there, offers a little hope that Smith still retains his pan-cultural appeal, with a good proportion of its rollout yet to come. After Earth, a striking 75.2% internationally slanted, clawed its way back to some semblance of respectability that way.

The winner

Global cinema is EL James’s gimp once again, despite further sizeable dropoffs for Fifty Shades of Grey this week: -53% in the US and -47% overseas. It’s close to $500m (£326m) worldwide now, with nearly 70% of that from outside the US – the kind of percentage you expect from CGI blockbusters, not adult-oriented character dramas. Universal’s adaptation has been a ruthless sweep, systematically wringing out the Fifty Shades fanbase in most territories: the running totals in the five front-runners (UK: $46.9m; Germany: $33.7m; France; $24.5m; Brazil $24.2m; Italy: $21.2m) would be enough, after three weeks, to place the film high up their respective top 10s for 2014. Compare that with American Sniper, the other dark-horse drama stacking up blockbuster-level readies, whose takings are 70% American – very much a unilateral box-office phenomenon. India (release to be announced) and, surprisingly, Egypt (11 March) are the only remaining international dates for Sam Taylor-Johnson’s film; only in the far east has it failed to dominate, with this week’s No 4 Korean opening ($1.8m) following up a feeble Japanese showing. Perhaps expectedly so, given that country’s long tradition of mainstream erotica.

The unexpected virtue of Iñárritu

Best-picture winner Birdman has seen the largest post-Oscar bounce effect of the past decade, the era in which specialist pictures – the plucky outsiders in a position to benefit most from a dose of extra publicity – have taken over the awards season. Distributor Fox Searchlight worked hard to made hay this week, tripling Birdman’s theatre-count in the US to nearly 1,200 and witnessing a 125% increase to $1.9m. That’s a leap and a bound from +89% for The Hurt Locker, +87% for 12 Years a Slave, +71% for No Country for Old Men – all in the sub-$100m bracket at the US box office. Bigger films, such as Argo ($136m US total, +15% post-Oscars weekend), The Departed ($132.3m US total, +11.3%) and The King’s Speech ($135.4m, -15.1%), saw less impact, presumably because it was harder for them to find untapped audiences. Adding new openings in France and Turkey this frame, Birdman also enjoyed a global surge – up 152% to $5.8m, 13th in the global peggings. Now at $86.2m, it’s still some way shy of director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s career-best: $135.3m for Babel, which was in some ways a more complex, chilly and less commercial work. But it also had Brad Pitt, which goes to show that star power still has an irresistible traction – greater than that of awards.

A line in the sand

China’s hesui pian – its New Year films – have become hotly contested fixtures, as shown by the news that February was the first ever full month in which the country’s box office exceeded the US’s: $650m to $640m. This happened largely because China’s key release window coincides with a month of no great consequence in the American box-office calendar (a big July, containing Independence Day, can bring in $1.3-1.4bn). But February’s figures are still a minor watershed in the lapping of the box-office tides, a sudden toe-wetting promising the big wave to come. And that is where Chinese annual takings finally wash over the $11bn mark the US has been hovering around for much of the past half-decade; even taking the most conservative Chinese annual growth rate (30%) of the past few years, that is due to happen in 2018.

But back to the spring-festival frenzy. The east-meets-west action spectacular Dragon Blade – given the thumbs-up in the first batch of English-language reviews – opened strongly last time, but it’s been outpaced this week by crime comedy From Vegas to Macau 2. The Chow Yun-Fat vehicle, in which he whisks up a tribute to his role from the iconic 1990s God of Gamblers series, has swept off $108m in box-office chips so far – to Dragon Blade’s $92m. Which makes it easily Chow’s most successful domestic film of the era in which he has drifted away from the HK scene and become an international player. Perhaps China’s most august star, he makes relatively few appearances these days, erring towards high-spec cameos and prestige parts, such as 2010’s Confucius (which only took $18.6m). From Vegas to Macau 2, supposedly a climbdown in quality from the first film, has already done more in Chinese box office than 2006’s Curse of the Golden Flower, the fiscal high point of Chow’s post-HK career until now, did in global ($78.6m). But that’s how explosive the Chinese market is these days.

The rest of the world

The UK’s Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel opened resoundingly on home turf – $5.9m to the first’s $3.5m. With Australia and New Zealand checking in as well for a $9.4m global total, it was just outside the top 10. More on that, and the seniors filmgoing demographic, as the film rolls out in March. Other than that, only the rest of the Chinese New Year field, discussed last week, made the Rentrak chart.

The future

Everyone, including Neill Blomkamp himself, seems to agree that his sophomore film, Elysium, was a disappointment. It hit black – $286m on a $115m outlay – but the sense is that his new film Chappie is aiming to return to the more idiosyncratic sci-fi of his debut District 9 and restore his tyro reputation. What looks like Short Circuit with high-spec military hardware hits close to 50 markets this coming weekend, including the US, Mexico, the UK, Russia, Germany and France. Elsewhere, Kenneth Branagh’s ultra-eclectic filmography as director takes another twist with his big-budget, live-action, plummy-toned remake of Cinderella for Walt Disney. Opening in Russia and a smattering of former Soviet territories, it goes down the more traditionalist fairytale track of the animated Frozen, rather the revisionist one of Maleficent and Into the Woods. Branagh’s current high-water mark as director is $449.3m for the first Thor. Fox’s entrepreneur comedy Unfinished Business – putting Vince Vaughn, Dave Franco and Tom Wilkinson together on a disastrous European business trip – goes out in 40 territories; almost everywhere except Europe. And Marigold Hotel, making doddery progress across the globe two or three territories at a time into early summer, opens in the US and Italy.

Top 10 global box office, 27 February-1 March

1. Fifty Shades of Grey, $46.9m from 60 territories. $486.2m cumulative – 69.6% international; 30.4% US
2. Kingsman: The Secret Service, $37.6m from 69 territories. $210.3m cume – 59.2% int; 40.8% US
3. (New) Focus, $31.3m from 32 territories – 39% int; 61% US
4. American Sniper, $27.2m from 60 territories. $470.2m cume – 29.6% int; 70.4% US
5. The Spongebob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, $25.4m from 47 territories. $236.6m cume – 40.7% int; 59.3% US
6. Big Hero 6, $22.1m from 26 territories. $572.2m cume – 61.4% int; 38.6% US
7. From Vegas to Macau 2, $22m from 5 territories. $108m cume – 100% int
8. Wolf Totem, $17m from 2 territories. $72m cume – 100% int
9. Dragon Blade, $12.5m from 5 territories. $92m cume – 100% int
10. (New) The Lazarus Effect, $10.6m from 1 territory – 100% US

• Thanks to Rentrak. Some of this week’s figures are based on estimates; all historical figures unadjusted, unless otherwise stated.