With an estimated opening weekend of $48.2 million, the adaptation of John Green’s best-seller had a best-ever debut for a contemporary drama.
Ansel Elgort, Nat Wolff, and Shailene Woodley in The Fault in Our Stars
James Bridges / 20th Century Fox
It's no secret that the contemporary drama has had a rough time at the box office for the past 15 years or so. As Hollywood's business model had become dominated by franchise movies, high concept comedies, and family pictures, movies about regular people living (more-or-less) regular lives in the world we live in now have become a scarce commodity at the multiplex.
That might begin to change with the phenomenal success of The Fault in Our Stars, which opened this weekend with an estimated $48.2 million — the best debut for a contemporary drama pretty much ever. I'm hedging my bets there because the definition of a "contemporary drama" is somewhat subjective. Some may count romantic comedies like Sex and the City or Valentine's Day , but I do not — while both of those films have some major dramatic moments, neither were made with anything close to the intent of rendering their audiences helpless amid a constant cascade of tears.
Adam B. Vary / BuzzFeed / Via boxofficemojo.com
The Fault in Our Stars does fall in the footsteps of a different kind of box office champion, however — the YA novel adaptation, typified in grand fantasies like The Twilight Saga , The Hunger Games , and most recently Divergent . With exactly zero CG-laden action sequences to its name, TFIOS' debut doesn't approach the box office highs of those movies, but the film nonetheless came with a passionate built-in fan base of author John Green's best-selling novel. That fan base was so passionate, in fact, that it dramatically front-loaded the movie's box office, bringing in $26.1 million, over half of its debut, on Friday and Thursday night (thanks to a $25-a-ticket special screening that included a simulcast Q&A with the film's stars and filmmakers).
The Twilight movies were similarly front-loaded, and subsequently suffered steep drop offs in ticket sales for the rest of their box office runs — a fate TFIOS could duplicate. But with a reported $12 million budget, TFIOS has also already made its money back, while dwarfing the paltry $29.1 million debut weekend for the Tom Cruise sci-fi thriller Edge of Tomorrow — also a very good movie, but one that cost over ten times as much to make and market as this weekend's box office champion.
Hollywood should heed those numbers. Building a movie about nothing more fantastical than the importance of human connection can be just as profitable as one built on the importance giant CG monsters — and far less of a financial risk. OK? OK.
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