Jason

It appears the Russian box office was much smaller back in 2003. Box Office Mojo indicates a final gross of $3.3M, which works out to about ₽100M based on 2003-2004 exchange rate. I don't know what average ticket prices were back then, but less than 100 ₽ seems pretty unlikely, so total number of admissions was probably not more than 1 million. For comparison: Gross Adm. Zootopia 2,275,064,104 ₽ 9,376,616 Frozen 1,106,184,366 ₽ 4,779,601 Inside Out 1,066,103,266 ₽ 5,007,546 Big Hero 6 889,919,810 ₽ 4,002,475 Tangled 731,157,700 ₽ 3,446,354 Monsters University 677,603,341 ₽ 3,469,070 Cars 2 558,836,385 ₽ 3,023,453 Brave 531,829,338 ₽ 2,608,926 Wreck-It Ralph 462,333,123 ₽ 2,166,703 Up 378,528,532 ₽ 2,333,026 The Good Dinosaur 349,829,565 ₽ 1,543,796 Bolt 336,669,088 ₽ 2,025,576 WALL * E 274,820,333 ₽ 1,978,805 Ratatouille 263,339,686 ₽ 2,188,944 Toy Story 3 206,121,091 ₽ 1,155,397 Princess and the Frog 154,251,967 ₽ 1,060,153

The only film I've seen on the entire list is Alexander Nevsky. Hope that makes you feel better.

What makes a movie so bad that even F isn't bad enough to describe it?

Oh darnit, did anyone record Zootopia's admissions for Tuesday?

So for a few days now, some people have been seeing 1 decimal place and others 2 decimal places for the RT ratings, as has been noted in the Finding Dory thread. But things are getting a little weirder: (Finding Nemo) (Zootopia) For Zootopia, there's also this: Box Office: $556988 Any insights on what's going on? It seems like a website update gone buggy, but it's buggy in a really weird way. I'm used to seeing wonky numbers that are at least meaningful in binary.

Agreed. Not sure what that's in reply to, my comment that Frozen could have done better with a "vacation day release" refers to the Japanese market. (I think the way I structured my above comment could pretty unclear.)

Excellent, if it's becoming an equivalent strategy, we'll have a larger data set to draw conclusions from. But at this time, and without doing a much more complete analysis, I get the impression that the total market for family films is much larger in the presence of holidays, and therefore in the absence of competition family films released at summer or winter holidays will do better. Even taking into account the greater competition at summer and winter holidays, I get the impression that the ceiling for attendance and total gross is higher. That being said, the point that studios might not even be trying to release good movies outside of school vacations is a good one. That has potential to be a very persuasive counter-argument to the importance of release date. Question is, are there examples other than Zootopia of a release outside of holidays that was well-liked by audiences? You've offered three examples that are all Disney animated features to counter what seems to be a much larger set of films that go against that trend. I don't see why I should be satisfied by that. I would be satisfied by a larger and more diverse set of films. This isn't a binary choice, essentially the larger and more diverse the set of films the more satisfied I'd be. Right now, I think the weight of evidence that you presented suggests that releasing during the prime months is the better strategy for most films. Also, I am not arguing that Tangled, Frozen, and Zootopia would have been better at a vacation day release, I'm arguing that that could be the case, and there isn't enough information to make a convincing argument either in favour or against release date being of importance.

There may be a case to be made that The Red Turtle should win the Oscar, but I'm very doubtful that it will. There have been a number of films from smaller/foreign studios that have had >95% on RT, and the only year one of them has won is 2002. Spirited Away is very deserving of that win, but even so I'm not sure it would have if it was up against a domestic competitor that was >95% on RT. (Best of its competitors was Lilo & Stitch at 86%.)

It's not hard to imagine though that Zootopia would have done even better with a June or November release though. In any case, one outlier doesn't disprove a general trend that holidays benefit attendance/total gross. If releasing family films away from school holidays to avoid competition were a good strategy, I'd expect to see more studios do it. I don't think Tangled, Frozen, and Zootopia being able to have very good legs in Japan is necessarily indicative of release date not being important. It could just mean that Disney films are leggier in general and would have been even leggier at a better release date. But I don't know enough about the Japanese market to be able to make a case in either direction, just that the data presented here lends itself to alternative conclusions.

I predicted $800M OS as a scientific wild-ass guess, main reasoning was Zootopia was going to top out at ~$690M OS as an original animation and Minions did $820M OS with the US dollar being relatively close to its current strength. But I forgot that FD is almost guaranteed to fall far short of Zootopia's total in China, even though it will probably outgross in many other regions. You've got me convinced though that $700M to $750M is a better estimate at this point.

OS gross revised upwards slightly, actual grosses as of 6/12/16:

Zootopia's opening weekend in Turkey, from boxofficeturkiye.com: SIRA Film Adı Vizyon Tarihi Dağıtım Salon Hafta Hafta Sonu Hasılat Hafta Sonu Seyirci Toplam Hasılat Toplam Seyirci 1 Sihirbazlar Çetesi 2 10.06.16 TME 279 1 1.099.505 TL 90.068 1.099.505 TL 90.068 2 Warcraft 03.06.16 UIP 322 2 1.085.153 TL 78.321 5.148.853 TL 388.222 3 Zootropolis: Hayvanlar Şehri 10.06.16 UIP 309 1 898.404 TL 70.010 898.404 TL 70.010 ₺898,404 = $308,232 at current exchange rate. For comparison: Inside Out was released last year on June 19, and had an OW of ₺892,100 and final gross of ₺5,599,413 ($1.9M at current exchange rate). Edit: Lol, I didn't see cannastop's above post. It links directly to Zootopia's page on the website.

This is the thread you're looking for. Welcome to the forums btw!

I seriously considered putting it down for $3M domestic. I'm not sure how badly FD is going to reduce the theatre count though, so I decided to be conservative with $2M. You've got me convinced that that was probably too conservative. Small as that difference is, it could very well be the extra $1M needed to squeak past JP.

Japan added another ~$4M this week, dropping at about 20% each week now, so about $16M remaining. About $2M remaining domestic (using above domestic total and taking into account FD), ~$2M from Turkey. Not sure if there's even $1M left in remaining overseas territories so I'm just going to ignore those. 1,006+16+2+2 = $1,026M. I think it's nearly guaranteed for Zootopia to pass The Hobbit ($1.021B), more likely than not to pass AiW ($1.025B), possible to pass SW:Ep. 1 ($1.027B), and in a best-case scenario could even pass JP ($1.030B).

Domestic hasn't been updated yet (not even with weekend estimate), but OS estimate is in: Zootopia has now passed TDK on the all-time WW list.

@Sirbadd @murkig Canada does indeed count as domestic. It's quite unusual for a film to perform substantially differently in Canada compared to the US.

From Corpse:

This is an excellent point. I think showing the perspectives of the filmmakers as they were in the process of making changes, as well as shots of the actual discussions taking place helped make Imagining Zootopia so fascinating. I don't have anything else to add to what's been said so far. A+.

I don't know if this counts as official:

Does anyone know what proportion of the market the TOHO listings usually are?

Date Day Adm U.L. Chng /wk 6-Jun-16 MON 25483 -66.21% 7-Jun-16 TUE 9788 -26.96% 8-Jun-16 WED 19642 -41.28% Monday's and Wednesday's drops are exagerrated because last Monday there were schools out and last Wednesday was 1st of the month.

I meant they watched it and weren't enthused about it. I used the values in your table and did adjustments for the exchange rate to March 2016 USD: Inside Out Country Unadjusted XR Adjusted Zootopia Argentina $19,302,798 $11,838,356 $10,502,199 Bolivia $1,000,127 $1,000,127 $909,666 Chile $7,434,521 $6,967,354 $4,266,919 Colombia $6,271,904 $5,195,684 $5,330,391 Ecuador $2,810,893 $2,810,893 $2,494,960 Mexico $31,100,000 $27,435,276 $17,139,134 Peru $3,783,213 $3,505,036 $4,242,507 Spain $24,035,511 $23,676,042 $14,877,004 Uruguay $970,095 $798,370 $463,743 Venezuela $25,432,065 n/a $1,496,048 (Bolivia's exchange rate is fixed, Ecuador uses USD, and Venezuela's official exchange rate is b.s. because of capital controls and price controls, black market value of currency is far, far less) After doing the exchange rate adjustments, the decrease for Argentina mostly disappears and Colombia ends up being almost the same as Zootopia. Spain and Mexico are definitely significantly less though and adjustment doesn't change that.

From Corpse:

@BaumerPlease tell us that Twilight is your attempt to out-do Panda's Interstellar trolling