So much for it being a "massive flop"....
Michael Fassbender's 'Assassin's Creed' Kicks Overseas Box Office Butt
I missed this box office news because it dropped after I closed the computer, but 20th Century Fox had a massive overseas expansion for their video game flick Assassin's Creed over the weekend. The film opened in a bunch of major markets (Switzerland, Chile, Greece, Israel, Denmark, Poland, Mexico, Russia, etc.) and basically doubled its overseas box office.
The film had around $50 million heading into the weekend (or at least at the end of last weekend) in foreign grosses. It earned another $45m over the weekend and brought its overseas cume to $98m. That includes $9m from Russia, $13m from France, and $7m from the United Kingdom. Including its $49.5m domestic total since opening just before Christmas of last year, the Regency/20th Century Fox offering has now earned $148m worldwide.
I don't want to proclaim that
Assassin's Creed is going to hit $300 million worldwide, but the math exists if everything goes right for the next two months. But let's assume that not everything goes right and perhaps the film peaked last weekend. What we'd still be left with is something akin to
The Legend of Tarzan which arguably overperformed in North America ($126m) and around the world ($353m) but still didn't qualify as a hit due to the $180m production budget.
Assassin's Creed was somewhat positioned as the would-be
Batman Begins of the video game movie sub-genre, a polished, handsomely-staged, expensive, and well-acted action drama that just happened to be based on a video game. It didn't turn out that way for director Justin Kurzel or his "doing the best they can" cast, as the film was just as roundly panned as your average
Warcraft or
Hitman: Agent 47. But it's doing just a bit better here and abroad than its relative peers.
This is going to be one to watch over the next month for a variety of reasons, but it looks like Fox might just get its overseas Christmas miracle after all. No, it won't approach the $440 million total of
Warcraft. But, by the time it's done,
Assassin's Creed might just... one-up... much of its relative competition.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottme...-kicks-overseas-box-office-butt/#5695364a1e0e