Box Office: '10 Cloverfield Lane' Scares Up $1.8M Thursday

With Thursday showings beginning at 7:00 pm in DLP and IMAX 2D, Paramount/Viacom Inc.’s 10 Cloverfield Lane began its top-secret box office sprint this weekend with a solid $1.8 million worth of Thursday grosses. The Bad Robot production was something of a stealth release, only announcing itself to the public over Martin Luther King Day weekend when its teaser was attached to opening night prints of Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. The film immediately caught the geek movie world’s attention due to its apparent ties to the 2008 smash hit monster movie Cloverfield. Both films were produced by J.J. Abrams although they were directed by Matt Reeves and Dan Trachtenberg respectively.
I can’t for the life of me find midnight box office numbers for Cloverfield (it came out just two months before I started regularly blogging about box office so I can’t just look up my own stuff), but that film had a whopping $17.1 million opening night before snagging a massive $40m Fri-Sun/$46m Fri-Mon holiday weekend. At the time, that was a new January box office record. It was also the start of a rather brief run, as the film was severely frontloaded and ended up with just $80m domestic in the end, which was fine for a $25m original movie even back in 2008.

Since I had to miss the press screening and was unable to attend last night’s previews, I cannot say to what extent this new Mary Elizabeth Winstead/John Goodman thriller is connected to the earlier “giant monster devastates New York” smash. The film technically concerns a young woman chained inside a house by a man who swears that it’s unsafe to go outside due to a chemical attack, but I shall find out the truth later this afternoon. You can read Aaron Neuwirth’s very positive review if you want more details. Oh, and for the record, the film was written by Josh Campbell, Matt Stuecken and Damien Chazelle.
As far as pure numbers, this is an impressive start for what was a pretty cheap production (over/under $15 million, give-or-take) and, due to the speed of the campaign, a comparatively cheap PR campaign. I’ll go into this throughout the weekend, but I rather love how Paramount just dumped this one on us just eight weeks prior to the opening day, forgoing the usual 1.5 year saturation-level marketing campaign filled with drips and drabbles of clips, images, spoiler-talk, and speculation. Anyway, 10 Cloverfield Lane feels like exactly the kind of film that fans rush out to see as soon as possible to as to uncover its mysteries, so I don’t think we’re looking at a $35m opening weekend here.

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Offhand, and for the record this could go either way, chalk it up to a 9% Thursday-to-weekend figure for a fine $20 million opening weekend. But honestly, and this is why I like to actually see the big releases prior to opening weekend, I am at somewhat of a disadvantage in terms of presuming how audiences will react to the film since I haven’t seen it. If I had to guess, I would say that business will be frontloaded, with mediocre audience scores from would-be fans expecting a more direct connection to Cloverfield or general dissatisfaction due to the fact that almost every horror movie ends up with poor CinemaScore-type grades. But until I see it later this afternoon, I am but a kite dancing in a hurricane.
Oh, and The Brothers Grimsby earned $235,000 last night while The Young Messiah earned $475k via its Thursday previews.