BTW one reason we don’t do well for these films is because they depend on female and kids audience a lot and moviegoing in India is very heavily male affair.
We don't have many black people in Asia. People tend to relate/connect with what look like them. Sure we don’t have white people too but in real world white race is generally look upto here. The beauty standards are such that people prefer fairer skin.
so black films will always find it tough here.
Waiting for ethnicity data but assuming TLM has 30% African American and finalise at $325M, that would mean non-Black total of ~$225M which will be around half of BATB.
Overseas won’t be too far off from 50% of BATB & that’s with big underperformance in China, Korea and likely Japan.
I think other reason is that for musical to work, music must work in first place, which almost never happens. For The Jungle Book they did promote it with TJB cartoon series theme song. was a bit disappointed that they didn't add it in credits.
or well just hire SRK
well fwiw I think TLM with Zendaya would have done a lot better OS.
though Aladdin did well because it was an excellent film which had a great response in Asia. its opening wasn't particularly high which is where star power mostly matter but legs were great.
its more like America has a significant black population. the areas with less black population under index in America as well. East coast overindex for black lead films. the other region with high black population is Africa & that doesn't really matter much at box office.
West & Canada underindex.
Similarly Chinese lead films overindex in Canada.