Coming away from this weekend, I’m informed that It grabbed more females than both American Made and Kingsman. However, one thing is clear: No one under the age of 25 wanted to watch a Tom Cruise movie. American Made, per CinemaScore, reports that only 9% of the opening weekend crowd was under 25. Close to half of CinemaScore’s audience was over the age of 50. Ugh. That younger audience for American Made was lost to It and Kingsman, the latter of which drew 66% under the age of 35. As we emphasized in our previous update, American Made, despite its greatness as a Tom Cruise movie, is just not one of his best at the box officeCin fact, his lowest opening since 2012’s Jack Reacher ($15M)Cand what American Made lacks, unlike Reacher, is a 5.3x holiday leg-out factor. Worldwide, this Cross Creek $60M net financed pic isn’t expected to profit after all revenue streams, per Deadline sources; American Made‘s global take is now at $81.7M.
Many sources continue to rail against Cruise, pointing out how his star is waning outside the Mission: Impossible movies; that his image is a double-edge sword that polarizes audiences. What’s clear here with American Made is that when you don’t have him on the global red carpet premiere circuit, the PR wattage for his movie depletes. And that’s unfortunate, because here’s a great movie that critics enjoyed with an 87% certified fresh Rotten Tomatoes score. Here’s an opportunity wasted for Cruise to make good with American Made after last June’s calamity, The Mummy. Premise and critics alone cannot sell a film.
Given how American Made came in lower than last autumn’s critically despised Jack Reacher: Never Go Back ($22.9M), one wonders whether Uni spent less than Paramount did in P&A. iSpot TV indeed shows this, with Jack Reacher 2 trailers running 4,591 times on TV with a national TV spend of $28.8M, while American Made spots ran 3,205 times off a $20.1M spend. One rival insider counters, defending Universal that they spent at least $31M on American Made and would never just dump a Cruise film into the marketplace. Again, the major difference between Jack Reacher 2 and American Made was that Cruise was on the global tour last year at this time. For the record, the chief reason keeping him out of American Made globe-trotting was his production commitment to Mission: Impossible 6 (this was before his injury).
Further slowing American Made down was its marketing and positioning: Was it a suspense film? Was it action? What was was the big event premise? Overall, the drug-runner subgenre, as we pointed out before, has been done too many times on the big screen; it’s a storyline that many can stay at home and watch for free on Netflix with Narcos and Breaking Bad. It comes as no surprise that American Made is opening close to other black market traffic movies, read Oliver Stone’s Savages ($16M) and Todd Phillip’s War Dogs last year ($14.7M).
