If any studio can afford a box office bomb this year it’s Disney, which is good because they suffered a massive one this weekend with the opening of Alice Through the Looking Glass. To be fair, it seemed like a good idea to greenlight a sequel to 2010’s Alice in Wonderland considering it opened to $116 million domestically and ended up with over a billion in box office sales worldwide, but to say Through the Looking Glass underperformed is like saying this election year has been just a tad peculiar.
According to the always helpful Box Office Mojo, Alice made less than $27 million for the three day weekend and around $34 million when you add its Memorial Day take. For those of you doing the math, that’s less than a quarter of what the first film took in. Sure we could speculate why this was (although we unanimously predicted it at the beginning of the year), but it’s more fun just to focus on the aftermath instead.
Look, we don’t want The Walt Disney Company to fail in any way, but this is a flop so spectacular it demands a certain amount of schadenfreude. With that in mind, we propose a game you can play along with on Twitter called #AliceMadeLessThan.
Here are a few (100% factual) things #AliceMadeLessThan:
- The first day of 2010’s Alice in Wonderland (even with Memorial Day added)
- Tomorrowland‘s opening weekend
- John Carter’s opening weekend
- The Lone Ranger’s opening weekend
- Prince of Persia‘s opening weekend
- The third weekend of Zootopia (it did slightly better than the fourth)
- Star Wars: The Force Awakens Thursday, December 17th premiere shows divided by two
- Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour opening weekend in 2008 when it played on 683 screens compared to 3,763 screens for Alice
- Flubber‘s opening weekend in 1997 (OK, if estimates stick, Alice will have beat it by a little bit, but still…)
This list could go on and on and on so feel free to tweet us @laughing_place for your best #AliceMadeLessThan (hint: Box Office Mojo is a great place to start).