Elementary tops the French box office, but no record for Pixar

Asteroid City recorded the worst start to Wes Anderson’s career since Rushmore in 1999, when he was doing well in the USA. (Source: French Film)

Four new products make it into the top 10 of the week in France: Elementary, Asteroid City, The challenge And 38°5 Quai des Orfèvres. If this makes it possible to upset the classification, they all record in their own way disappointing beginnings. Explanations.

Elementary starts at the top, with 426,818 tickets sold in 634 theaters, including its previews. This is quite far from the following films, below the 200,000 mark, but it is still low for a Disney and/or Pixar animated production: all the studio’s recent films have done better: 482,715 for Buzz Lightning526 906 for Encanto515 381 for Ahead and even 1.5 million in the first week for Toy Story 4.

We have to see if, as in the United States, the film will hold up well over time? In the second weekend, it lost few attendances there, while at the same time, The Flash was collapsingwhich allowed him to hang on the podium.

In second position, we do not find Andy Muschietti’s blockbuster, but another animated film receiving good reviews: Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse, produced by Sony. With 193,102 additional admissions, it accumulated 1.4 million tickets in one month.

The Flash is third, thanks to 184,539 more spectators, or 570,000 in two weeks. This represents a fall of more than half of its attendance.

Transformers 7Asteroid City And The little Mermaid are then the only ones to maintain or start beyond 100,000 entries. Wes Anderson’s film, however, does less well than its predecessors with 117,498 countermarks exchanged. We have to go back to 1999 and the release of Rushmore to find a weaker start within his career.
Paradoxically, in the United States, it’s the opposite: going from “limited release” to extended distribution this weekend, the film recorded the best debut of his entire filmofar ahead of that of The French Dispatch released last year: $9 million earned in three days vs. 2.5 million. The Texan filmmaker is therefore the opposite of Damien Chazelle or Steven Spielberg, whose latest films babylon And The Fabelmans went unnoticed in their country of origin, before find their audience in France.

The comedies with Jennifer Lawrence and Didier Bourdon therefore start at the end of the ranking, around 50,000 tickets sold, which is not much for such popular actors. The ex-Inconnu had started beyond the million thanks to Alibi.com 2 earlier in the year. It must be said that the promotion of challenge and of 38°5 Quai des Orfèvres was limited and that the American film was not shown to the French press.

French weekly box office from June 21 to 27, 2023: