Reagan has dominated a horde of other new releases during a slow summer weekend at the domestic box office. The new movie, directed by Sean McNamara, is a biopic of former President Ronald Reagan starring Dennis Quaid in the title role. The Reagan release came during the final weekend of August, at the same time as several similar non-tentpole new releases including the Blumhouse AI horror movie Afraid, the L.A. riots thriller 1992, and the Casey Affleck sci-fi movie Slingshot.
Per Deadline, as of Saturday morning, projections for the domestic box office show the overall grosses turning out one of the summer’s slower weekends in spite of the 4-day Labor Day holiday. The holdover hit Deadpool & Wolverine is continuing to reign supreme, taking the No. 1 spot for the fifth non-consecutive time with a projected 4-day total between $19 and $20 million. Of the raft of new releases hitting theaters, the most prominent was Reagan, which is projected to rake in a 4-day debut of $9 million and land on the chart at No. 4.
How Reagan Is Performing Compared To Similar Movies
The Presidential Biopic Still Needs To Make Back Its Budget
Although it defeated the other new releases for the weekend, premiering at No. 4 shows that Reagan could not quite muster the strength to elbow out the holdover hits for the weekend, in spite of the fact that some of them have been in theaters for roughly a month or more. However, the movie only cost $25 million, so it does not necessarily need to compete with rivals like the Deadpool & Wolverine box office, as that title is a big-budget superhero blockbuster. Below, see how it measures up to comparable presidential biopics or similar releases:
|
Title |
Budget |
Opening Weekend |
Total Box Office |
|---|---|---|---|
|
JFK (1991) |
$40 million |
$5.2 million |
$205.4 million |
|
Nixon (1995) |
$44 million |
$2.2 million |
$13.7 million |
|
Primary Colors (1998) |
$65 million |
$12 million |
$52.1 million |
|
Frost/Nixon (2008) |
$25 million |
$180,708 (limited) |
$27.4 million |
|
W. (2008) |
$25.1 million |
$10.5 million |
$29.5 million |
|
Lincoln (2012) |
$65 million |
$944,308 (limited) |
$275.3 million |
|
LBJ (2016) |
$20 million |
$1.1 million |
$2.5 million |
Generally, a movie needs to earn somewhere between two and two-and-a-half times its budget in order to turn a profit in theaters, which could place Reagan‘s break-even point somewhere between $50 and $62.5 million. However, given the precedent set by previous presidential biopics, even those that opened higher than $9 million, it seems somewhat unlikely to hit that mark. The only ones that were runaway successes were JFK and Lincoln, which had well-known filmmakers Oliver Stone and Steven Spielberg attached, and it does not seem likely that McNamara has the same sort of household brand name appeal as those directors.
It ultimately remains to be seen how Reagan performs over the course of its theatrical run. While it will have fierce competition in its second weekend with the release of the Tim Burton legacy sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, September is relatively free of major adult new releases, with the biggest upcoming titles being the animated prequel Transformers One and the Halle Berry horror thriller Never Let Go. This could allow the biopic a clear runway to continue to draw in audiences throughout the close of the summer movie season.
Source: Deadline
