April Box Office Round Up

Divergent couldn’t breathe fire into its dwindling UK success this month

As predicted, Captain America dominated the first part of April and finished with a total of £18 million in the UK alone. This was helped by a lack of major competition as it easily saw off the next biggest film around that time, Rio 2. The bird-focused animation ended the month with just over £11 million, and made almost £350 million worldwide so could easily spawn a third film in the franchise.

On the other hand, Divergent failed to excite audiences, despite several trailers and posters mimicking the style of The Hunger Games. Perhaps word of mouth or a lack of desire to see a The Hunger Games rip off sealed its fate in the UK as it ended the month with a small £6 million. To compare the two, The Hunger Games took just under $350 million in its first month in the U.S., whereas Divergent took a smaller $130 million. Despite this, the film is strong elsewhere and Summit Entertainment have three more instalments prepped and ready for an annual staggered release between 2015-17.

The Russell Crowe led Noah did surprisingly well, considering its strong religious subject matter, taking £9 million by the end of the month in the UK alone. Most heavily religious movies tend to split audiences but the action/fantasy style that Noah adopted could create a gap in the market for a flurry of similar religious movies following Noah’s continuing success across the world.

Having said that, April was always going to be overtaken by Hollywood super franchise, Spider-Man, which is already ranked as the fourth highest grossing franchise of all time, that’s before the newest instalment, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was even released on the 16th April. The new film took an incredible £9 million in its very first week and a still impressive £3 million in its second week. It’ll be interesting to see how quickly this last taking diminishes during the next few weeks. It’s possible every Spider-Man fan has been to see this already, but even if that’s the case it’s still done incredibly well. The U.S. hasn’t even seen the film yet, so expect big things on its release on 2nd May stateside.

April has been a big month for blockbuster film. What did you see and what did you miss? What would you say was the biggest disappoint amongst cinema releases in April? Let us know in the comments below.

Click here to view the latest Box Office Table