Hollywood is absolutely obsessed with sequels, reboots and remakes right now, and the results vary wildly in terms of quality and success. This weekend, fans were offered up a sequel many had been waiting 20 years for in the form ofIndependence Day: Resurgence. There is no one reason why, but as of now, it looks like the movie is going to wind up being a pretty big flop for Fox.
According toBox Office Mojo, the movie pulled in just north of $100 million internationally. That number may seem decent enough, but there are a lot of other factors at play. For one,Resurgencedidn’t do very well domestically, having lost out toFinding Doryfor the top spot, pulling in a very disappointing $41.6 million in its opening weekend. Those numbers coupled with the reported $165 million production budget paint a pretty bleak picture.
Essentially, that $165 million production budget is only a part of the equation. Studios spend a lot of money on movies likeResurgencein the development phase, which isn’t factored into the production budget. Not only that, but studios like Fox have to spend an awful lot of money, sometimes as much as the production budget itself, to market a huge, tentpole movie. Fox opted out of a massive press tour, but they definitely put some big dollars into the marketing campaign. All of that to say, it doesn’t look good for the future of theIndependence Day franchise.
Resurgenceshould pull in some decent money in the next few weeks overseas, but heavy competition is going to force it out of the top five stateside in a hurry. If Fox is really lucky, the movie will make around $375 million worldwide, but that is a very optimistic number at this point. The movie was not benefited at all by the fact that critics largely didn’t seem to love it and the fan score onRotten Tomatoescurrently sits at a really sour 40 percent. Unlike a movie likeWarcraft, which did very poorly on the domestic side but killed itoverseasand also was very well liked by fans,Resurgenceis losing out on all phases.
Theoriginal Independence Daymade $817 million worldwide in 1996, which was virtually unheard of money at the time and made it one of the most successful movies of all time up to that point.Roland Emmerichhad been flirting with a sequel for years, but it may have just been too little too late, or just simply not good.Emmerichwas originally going to shoot a thirdIndependence Daymovie back-to-back withResurgence, but that plan was scrapped. The idea is still in place andEmmerichseems optimistic about it, but if the box office numbers don’t dramatically improve somehow, that seems very unlikely.Independence Day: Resurgenceis in theaters now.
