DCM Fantasy Film League Reaches The Business End

I hate to bring attention to the fact that we’re closer to the end of summer than the start but let’s not focus on that and focus instead on the fact that the DCM fantasy film league is in its exciting latter stages. As you probably know by now, we asked participants to pick a selection of films from different categories that hit cinemas this summer. We then collate the opening week box office performance for each film and whoever has the highest total at the end of the summer wins a five star cinema experience in London. It should be easy, but predicting film performance rarely is and this summer has definitely sprung a few surprises.

Since the last update some of the summer’s biggest films have been unleashed in cinemas and have had a crack at toppling X-Men: Days of Future Past’s first week high of £14.8m. Of the newest contenders, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes came closest with £12.2m, which is the second highest opening week of the summer and a big improvement on the £8.6m Rise of the Planet of the Apes kicked off with in 2011.

The last Transformers film’s opening week was £12.1m, so the newest entry, Age of Extinction was expected to be a contender for the biggest opener of the summer. Add in Mark Wahlberg’s star power and it felt like a pretty good bet. Alas, Age of Extinction could only manage £9m in its opening week, a decent figure but a bit of a disappointment. The other major opener was the summer’s big animation, How To Train Your Dragon 2. Perhaps a victim of its unusual release strategy, it previewed regionally and then around the country on three weekends prior to release, it could only manage £4.3m during its opening week.

In the arthouse category, the best reviewed film of the year so far, Boyhood opened with £565k, which is the highest opening week in the category to date. In the family category, Pudsey The Dog: The Movie, which wasn’t the best reviewed film of the year so far, opened with £678k, the lowest in the category to date.

Of the films still to open, there’s still a couple of bona fide big hitters to come. Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy has been getting rave reviews and with the school holidays in full swing has the potential to open big. The first Inbetweeners Movie opened earned £16.4m in August 2011 so if the sequel replicates that performance, it’ll be the biggest opener of the summer. Two relatively unknown propositions are Scarlett Johansson sci-fi, Lucy, which has just opened strongly in the US and The Expendables 3, which has been given a 12A certificate by the BBFC, after the first two Expendables films were 15 cert. Could that affect its box office?

Looking at the leaderboard below, it’s going to go right down to the wire. Summer may be reaching its climax but so is the year’s most exciting competition.