This last weekend, the live-action rendition of Beauty and The Beast crushed expectations, and opened to an absurd $170M domestically, good for the 7th biggest U.S. opening of all time, and EASILY the biggest PG opening ever.
Buried under that incredible headline was the even more shocking number of women who saw this movie. Now we all knew women were going to show up for a modern rendition of a childhood classic, especially one starring Emma Watson. Personally, I was expecting somewhere in the neighborhood of Frozen’s 57%.
In the immortal words of our president: WRONG!
SEVENTY TWO PERCENT of viewers were women. That means 72% of $170M! Given an average ticket price of $8.65, we’re looking at over 14 MILLION women who went to see this movie. In the United States. Just this weekend.
To give you an idea of the insanity of this number, that’s over FOUR TIMES the total attendance of the Women’s March. Again: even if we ignore all foreign box office receipts AND count the late-Thursday night viewings as their own separate day, Beauty and the Beast AVERAGED more attendees than the combined attendance of the biggest protest march in American history.
As (mostly) dads, we know that between Marvel, Star Wars, and ESPN, Disney owns an absurd proportion of the the things that make bring happiness to grown up boys. We’d be fools to forget, however, where Disney first learned to butter its bread. With a murderer’s row of upcoming live adaptations of classics already in the works, the Magic Kingdom is still very much in the #Princess business, and business. is. good.
The lesson, as always, is that The Walt Disney Co. personally owns our collective childhood, and is without peer when it comes to selling pieces of it back to us every fiscal year.
More succinctly: no one f**** with The Mouse.
