Box Office: Sony Moves ‘Monster Hunter’ To December 18

Now that the film’s theatrical release in China turned out to be a gigantic disaster of (almost) comical proportions, at least Monster Hunter isn’t an obscenely expensive picture and could still squeeze out a few bucks in the rest of the world. That includes North America, where the film will open theatrically (including IMAX) not on Christmas Day but on December 18. In a normal year, in a normal time, that would be one of the best release dates available to any movie.

Films big (The Force Awakens, Titanic) and small (Sisters, Mouse Hunt) have used that pre-Christmas launch pad to score good-to-great opening weekends and comparatively long legs as the holiday break for kids and many adults turns the last two weeks of the year into essentially two weeks of “weekdays that act like weekends.” But this obviously isn’t a normal time, and the only reason Sony moved the film is to get out of the way of Wonder Woman 1984.

Yes, the Gal Gadot/Chris Pine superhero sequel is still opening in whatever North American theaters will be open come December 25, and the “partially shot in IMAX” fantasy will get priority on those IMAX auditoriums. Monster Hunter is positioning itself, relatively speaking, as the kinda-sorta biggie before the mega-movie. In that skewed sense, it’s Star Trek Nemesis or The Princess and the Frog opening before The Two Towers or Avatar.

As for the Paul W.S. Anderson-directed flick, the $60 million, PG-13 video game adaptation has earned $2.65 million, including $1.5 million in Taiwan, in the handful of overseas territories in which it opened last weekend. It was allegedly looking at an over/under $15 million weekend before the feces hit the fan, with the film being pulled after audiences took umbrage at a line of dialogue spoken by Asian actor/musician Jin Au-Yeung that indirectly referenced an infamously racist grade-school/playground song.

Whether it returns to Chinese theaters sans that momentary interaction is unknown, but I’d argue the damage is probably done. No, the movie wasn’t neccessarily going to equal the $159 million earned by Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (out of its $312 million global cume), but the popularity of that Milla Jovovich-starring video game movie was why Sony and friends released it in theaters now instead of pushing it into 2021. China’s marketplace is pretty much back to normal, even if Hollywood imports haven’t had a ton of luck there this year, save for Tenet ($66 million) and The Croods: A New Age ($34 million).

The good news is that, while I haven’t seen the movie yet (gives Sony the “Paddington stare”), the last five theatrically released video game movies have been varying degrees of “good.” Tomb Raider (decent), Rampage (awesome), Detective Pikachu (very good), Angry Birds Movie 2 (surprisingly good) and Sonic the Hedgehog (decent) have rebuked conventional wisdom about video game-based movies being varying degrees of terrible. Will Monster Hunter make it 6/6? Find out, if you dare, on December 18.