Disney’s Limited Release Of ‘Soul’ Fails To Make Music As First Weekend Run Pulls In Just $318 Per Theater
Spencer Baculi
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[Editor’s Note: This article originally portrayed Soul’s debut weekend as its one and only in theaters. This was a mistake based on an incorrect read of local theaters’ release calendars. This has been fixed in the headline; original story follows below.]
Another day, another black eye for Disney
In no doubt crushing the hopes of every company executive who though the move would earn them a much-needed easy win at the box office, Disney’s limited theatrical release of Pixar’s Soul has ended its sole weekend on the big screen with a total box office just shy of $450,000 dollars.
No need to adjust your screens: You read that right. That total is not in the millions, but rather in the mid-thousands.
Per box office tracking outlet The-Numbers, in its opening Jan 12th -Jan 14th weekend, the 2020 Pixar film managed to pull in a measly $429,000 across 1,350 domestic theaters.
This amounts to an average box office of $318 per theater, which when further compared against the current average movie ticket price of roughly $10.50 reveals that each such establishment saw an average Soul attendance rate of just 30 moviegoers per day throughout the entire three-day window.
Unfortunately for the House of Mouse, given that this was the only weekend its limited release engagement would have it in theaters, it’s unlikely that Soul‘s box office results will see any significant explosion before it goes back to Disney Plus on January 18th.
Further, these results cast doubt on the potential for the upcoming “special engagement theatrical runs” of Turning Red and Luca to fare any better when they hit big screens nationwide on February 9th and March 22nd respectively.
After all, if this is the result for arguably the best film in its line-up (with Luca coming in at a close second and Turning Red a far third), it’s unlikely that the event’s subsequent outings will be able to garner any significant uptick in attendance – especially if a lack of word of mouth and social excitement leaves audiences with little reason to pay extra money for something they can already stream for free.
Notably, this result lines up with previous speculation that, rather than any sort of significant box office and reputational boon, the House of Mouse’s trio of belated theatrical debuts would ultimately end up leaving them embarrassed yet again.
After all, not only had all three of these films, as noted above, been freely available to screen for at least a year on Disney Plus, but unlike previous such theatrical re-releases as The Lord of The Rings trilogy or James Cameron’s original Avatar film, none of them – and in the case of Soul and Luca despite their high quality – have gone on to be heralded as a significant cultural or ‘fandom’ film.
As such, while each film stood a chance of ending their theatrical runs with a modest box office take, it was always far more likely that they would end up coming and going to absolutely little, if any, fanfare, resulting in Disney having to walk away with yet another loss to add to their ever-growing list of financial missteps.
To this end, it will be interesting to see whether or not the disappointing outcome of Soul‘s theatrical release will have any effect on Disney’s aforementioned plans for both Luca and Turning Red‘s own upcoming screen runs.
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