The runaway success of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has been phenomenally derailed in the United Kingdom by a little girl who loves a good book. Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical took $5 million in its opening weekend for Sony Pictures, which was good enough for more than 50% of the entire U.K. box office. The film earned around 50 percent more than Wakanda Forever and five times that of Disney’s box office bomb Strange World.
Starring Emma Thompson, Lashana Lynch and Alisha Weir, who plays the titular character, the film has been adapted from the runaway stage success. The stage production won seven Olivier Awards in 2012, including Best New Musical, with its music and lyrics by the comedian Tim Minchin earning widespread critical acclaim. Praise has followed the film adaptation, with its score sitting at 93% positive on Rotten Tomatoes, and particular praise going to Thompson’s Miss Trunchbull as “a deranged villain to remember”.
The film will be released worldwide via Netflix, but it has been granted an exclusive theatrical release in the U.K. and Ireland, partly due to being produced by Working Title. It is the third Netflix film currently available in U.K. cinemas, following the limited release of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Story and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which stars Emma Corrin and Jack O’Connell, and has been released in fewer than 25 locations. In a similar pattern to observations made in the United States, Glass Onion has been performing very strongly despite the lack of locations, and the dearth of financial information made available by Netflix, which refuse to report box office figures.
The success of these films away from North America may well give Netflix food for thought; with Glass Onion thought to have earned somewhere in the region of $13 million to $15 million in its limited release across the USA, there is the realistic thought that Netflix may well be leaving money on the table by not giving some of their bigger exclusives longer theatrical runs. While Matilda is a cultural benchmark in the United Kingdom and may not necessarily have found this success elsewhere around the globe, it is still a surprise to discover that it knocked off a Marvel blockbuster just a few weeks following its release. Glass Onion would have definitely finished in second place, had its $19,000 per location average been spread across a wide release. Matilda had, allowing for currency exchange, a $7,453 per location average in the U.K.
You can check out the trailer for Matilda the Musical down below. It launches on Netflix on December 25.