Colin Farrell doesn’t have many ‘true friends.’ But Brendan Gleeson is one of them.
The cast of The Shape of Water – or more of those things you can’t put into words – is pretty much the reason the film opens in what should be the sixth place in the U.K. box office this weekend.
A $19 million four-day gross indicates that movie-goers are just getting started on one of the year’s most mind-blowing genre pictures, which tells the story of a mute man (Frances McDormand) who falls to Earth from a luxury cruise liner.
The Shape of Water is a dazzling feat of visual storytelling, and it came out in a month when the public was just beginning to recognize its cinematic potential. A huge, star-studded cast and a director with a history of making Oscar contenders — Guillermo del Toro, who was the man behind Cronos in 2014 — propelled the sci-fi pic into theaters in the U.K. with a $38 million start.
The picture was also backed by a major distributor and the U.K. box office took a big hit — the equivalent of a year’s profits — when the film went over budget. The film is in the U.S., where it was released in a modest number of theaters but performed much better.
Now the film’s global gross has rocketed to $76 million, and it’s showing a profit. With a few weeks to go in the run, The Shape of Water has racked up about $40 million outside the U.K., with about $7 million earned from overseas over the weekend. In the final quarter of the year, that would place it as the 10th-biggest opening of all time for a genre film.
The film, the first major project from the director who made Pacific Rim, should be the main draw in the next week or so. If there are any movies to be made around those two projects, it is a safe bet they won’t be big, though the world will always love The Shape of Water.
On the film’s opening weekend, it was the biggest debut for a major release of 2016, setting another record for an early film release.
In terms of market size, it’s close to the $100 million gross of the Disney Animation Studios release Frozen