While the musical period drama filmThe Color Purpledidn’t arrive with the same commercial expectations asAquaman and the Lost KingdomandWonka, the fact that the movie was released on Christmas Day, three days afterAquaman and the Lost Kingdomand ten days afterWonka, clearly indicated that Warner Bros. Pictures, the distributor of all three films, viewedThe Color Purpleas being a prestige film with serious Oscar potential.
Indeed,The Color Purplewas easily the most prestigious film released over the holiday season. Based on an acclaimed stage musical of the same name, which was based on Alice Walker’s 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the film has received critical acclaim and an excellent audience score. Of course, Walker’s novel was previously adapted into the1985 Steven Spielberg-directed dramatic filmof the same name, which famously received eleven Academy Award nominations but didn’t win anything.
The Color Purplehad one of thebiggest Christmas Day openingsat the domestic box office in history, with sold-out showings across North America. The film seemed poised to become not just an Oscar contender but also the surprise hit of the generally lackluster holiday box-office season.
However, the near record-breaking opening ofThe Color Purplehas been followed by a steep decline. In the span of two weeks, the movie has gone from being a potential blockbuster and savior for the musical film genre to a box-office disappointment.
The Color Purple
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For its Christmas Day opening,The Color Purple, which carries a production cost of approximately $100 million, was projected to gross between $8 million and $10 million at the domestic box office.The Color Purpleinstead grossed approximately $18.15 million on Christmas Day, far ahead ofAquaman and the Lost Kingdom, which took second place with a gross of approximately $10.4 million. The $18.15 million figure represents the second-highest Christmas Day domestic opening for a film, behind onlySherlock Holmes, which debuted with a gross of approximately $24.6 million on Christmas Day in 2009.
The Color Purple Cast & Character Guide
Meet the outstanding cast and characters featured in the musical adaptation of The Color Purple.
However, for its second day of domestic release, the day after Christmas,The Color Purplefinished third, behindAquaman and the Lost KingdomandWonka, with a gross of approximately $7 million domestically, for a drop of over sixty-one percent from Christmas Day. For New Year’s Day,The Color Purplegrossed approximately $2.6 million domestically, a decline of over eighty-five percent from the Christmas opening. Moreover, as the movie enters its second full weekend of domestic release, it is tracking in sixth place behind the filmThe Boys in the Boat, which debuted in fourth place on Christmas Day.
The stark disparity between the Christmas Day opening forThe Color Purpleand its current lagging box-office trajectory is a testament to the disproportionate impact of the group sale ticket campaign that Warner Bros. Pictures launched for the film. While the group sale tactic, which was previously employed by Angel Studios with thecontroversial movieSound of Freedom, was brilliantly effective in terms of launchingThe Color of Purpleat the box office, the residual effect has proven to be increasingly negligible.
The Color Purple Hasn’t Attracted a Diverse Audience
The heavily front-loaded nature of the box office performance ofThe Color Purpleis related to a pronounced lack of diversity within the demographic of the film’s audience, which has become very polarized, even though audiences of all demographics have expressed seemingly universal admiration for the movie along withsurpassing the original 1985 film’s Rotten Tomatoes score.
While approximately sixty-five percent of the film’s current audience is Black,according to Deadline, less than twenty percent of the audience is white, while Hispanic viewers only represent slightly more than ten percent of the film’s audience. In contrast, the Broadway musical on which the film is based became a hit on Broadway, where the musical debuted in 2005, precisely because its audience was virtually evenly divided between Black and white patrons,according to Today.
This lack of diversity is also reflected in the film’s seeming lack of international appeal. WhileThe Color Purplehas yet to be released overseas, the film seems destined to receive a tepid reception, much like what happened with the 1985 film, which grossed approximately $94 million at the domestic box office but only slightly more than $4 million overseas.
The Color Purple Is Unlikely to Be Profitable
After its Christmas Day opening, the industry projections forThe Color Purplehad the film surpassing the $100 million mark at the domestic box office. However, the film, which has presently grossed approximately $50 million at the box office, is on pace to fall far short of this total. Indeed, of the top ten Christmas Day-opening films in history,The Color Purplemay become the only film on the list to fail to surpass the $100 million mark at the domestic box office.
With a production cost of $100 million,The Color Purplemust, assuming a marketing cost of $50 million, gross between $300 million and $350 million at the worldwide box office to reach its theatrical break-even point. Given the film’s bleak prospects overseas and dwindling domestic box-office performance, it seems virtually impossible that the movie will reach this threshold. However, the box-office failure ofThe Color Purple, which will hopefully avoid being one of thebiggest box-office bombs of 2023, has been overshadowed by the aura of the film’s spectacular opening, creating a media and public perception that the film is a hit.The Color Purpleis playing in theaters now.
