‘Cinderella’ enchanted audiences this weekend, racking up a royal $70.1 million to lead the domestic box office and a massive $132 million globally.
The adaptation of the classic fairy tale follows Walt Disney Studios’ strategy of raiding its library of animated favorites to refashion as live-action blockbusters - an approach that yielded such successes as ‘Maleficent’ and ‘Alice in Wonderland’, and one the studio plans to employ on ‘Dumbo’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast’, Variety reported.
‘Cinderella’ opened across 3,845 theaters in North America and cost $95 million to produce. It couldn’t match the $116.1 million debut of ‘Alice in Wonderland’, but it did surpass the $69.4 million premiere of ‘Maleficent’. That’s impressive considering that, despite featuring Cate Blanchett, it lacked a star on the level of Johnny Depp or Angelina Jolie to bring in crowds. It also cost half of the roughly $200 million each that Disney spent producing those fantasies.
‘Cinderella’ was a juggernaut overseas, picking up an estimated $62.4 million, $25 million of which came from China. The film opened in about 60% of the international marketplace, including such major territories as Russia, Italy, Mexico and Germany.
Cinderella’s popularity left Liam Neeson’s latest action-adventure, ‘Run All Night’, huffing and puffing at the finish line. The Warner Bros. release pulled in a lackluster $11 million from 3,171 theaters, lower than pre-release tracking, which suggested a debut in the $15 million range. The movie is the story of a father protecting his son (Joel Kinnaman) from mob hit men.
