Monday Update: Whoda thunk it? Passengers, by any yardstick a serious underperformer, surged on Sunday and now has a five-day tally of $30 million and change. It could rack up another $4 or $5 million today for a grand six-day total of $34 or $35 million — roughly $10 million shy of expectations but a slightly less embarassing performance.
Sunday, 12.25: Morten Tyldum and Jon Spaihts‘ Passengers looked like a tank almost immediately, and the fact that it had only made $11,825,201 after three days of play (12.21 thru 12.23) indicated a serious shortfall. On 12.22 Deadline‘s Anthony D’Allesandro wrote that Passengers had to bring in “$45 to $50 million in its first six days” to maintain a respectable pose. (I’m told that two weeks ago the Sony release was actually tracking to hit $55 million within the first six.)
This morning’s Deadline update projects a four-day tally of $19.3 to $20 million and grand six-day total of $26.6 to $28 million. At best that’s $17 million short of the 12.22 D’Allesandro projection. Passengers, face it, is a dead herring in the moonlight, certainly in relation to cost.
If Tyldum, Spaihts and Sony execs had taken the post-mortem advice of Indiewire‘s David Ehrlich and gone with his alternate ending (i.e., Chris Pratt heroically dies in Act Three and then a year or two later Jennifer Lawrence realizes that she needs to wake someone up herself to avoid a lifetime of solitude), the film would at least have a rich ironic ending, and this might have turned the whole ship around.