Whalefall Cost $60 Million to Put a Man Inside a Whale and Opened at $8 Million

There is a version of this weekend where a man trapped inside a sperm whale is the movie everyone talks about. That version made $8 million.

Whalefall, Brian Duffield’s film of Daniel Kraus’s novel, opened at $8 million in North America from 3,065 theaters. Worldwide, Screen Daily put it at about $17.5 million, with international slightly ahead of the domestic number at $9.5 million. The production cost is reported around $60 million. Tracking before the weekend had been spotting something nearer $11 million. Friday, including previews, was in the mid $2 millions. Brian Grazer and Imagine are on the producer list. Austin Abrams, who was just swallowed by zombies in Resident Evil, spends this one swallowed by a whale. CinemaScore came back a B. The Rotten Tomatoes audience score sat around 82 percent. People who went did not hate it. There were not enough of them.

Deadline’s explanation is rude and probably right. The over-25 men and women who might have bought this ticket were in the Holmes documentary or at Street Fighter. Men were 55 percent of Whalefall’s audience. The 25-to-34 group was the largest slice, 36 percent, and 69 percent of the crowd was over 25. Premium formats were only 21 percent of the money. Sea thrillers have a long memory of this exact shape. The Perfect Storm opened at $41 million in 2000 with Clooney and Wahlberg. In the Heart of the Sea drowned a $100 million budget on an $11 million start. The Finest Hours opened at $10.2 million. Both finished in the mid-twenties at home.

A B and an 82 percent audience score are not a rejection of the idea. They are a receipt from the people who found a seat. The other two films this weekend took the seats first: a fighting game people already knew how to quote, and a three-hour documentary that sold out. A whale is a hard sell when the lobby is already full.