If you build it, they will come. No, we’re not talking baseball, we’re talking movies marketed to women, specifically the new romantic drama “Me Before You,” which outperformed projections and made a big showing at the box office this weekend.
As Deadline details, “Me Before You” directed by Thea Sharrock, written by Jojo Moyes’ and based on her tear-jerker novel of the same name, had an estimated budget of about $20 million and a projected box office takeaway for $12-$14 million. But under-served female audiences aching for something besides a superhero flick came out in droves, leading “Me Before You” to earn a weekend box office total of $18.3 million with another $7.7 million internationally for a third place finish after “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows” and “X-Men: Apocalypse.”
“We looked at a busy marketplace and said ‘where is there a movie for older females and younger females? Let’s put it right against the more male-driven, superhero, four-quadrant movies. Zero in on the female demographic,’” said Jeff Goldstein, executive vice president of Domestic Distribution for Warner Bros. “We were hoping to do somewhere between $13 and $15 million. It’s a big win for us.”
Though the film has earned mixed reviews from critics, “Me Before You” has an 83% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and an A rating on CinemaScore. As USA Today detailed, the audience skewed 81 percent female, of which 53 percent were over the age of 35. So despite what some critics may believe, the ages of “Me Before You” characters and its audience indicate that this is not a YA film.
Coming in third might not seem like a win, but with sequels like “TMNT” under performing at $35.3 million (it was aiming for $49 million) suggests that female audiences were — and are — hungry for something else. The box office success of “Me Before You” is more evidence that underestimating the ticket-buying power of women is never wise.
