Adult Animation Box Office: Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero Destroys The Bob’s Burgers Movie In First Week Bows
No matter which way director Loren Bouchard wants to sugar coat it, The Bob’s Burgers Movie was a bomb. If a sequel were to happen, and I know both the voices and producers would like to do one, I doubt it gets as wide a theatrical release as the original. After concluding it’s theatrical run on August 9th, The Bob’s Burgers Movie grossed $34.1 million against a $58 million budget (including marketing expenses), for The Bob’s Burgers Movie to have been successful at the box office, the film would’ve had to have made around $90 million after it was all is said and done, and the movie only pulled in a 1/3 of that. Unfortunately, this doesn’t bode for Disney if the company wants to continue releasing adult animation theatrical releases with Seth MacFarlane constantly teasing a full-length Family Guy and an American Dad movie having already been scrapped. Producers from The Simpsons, the benchmark for American-made adult animation, are also teasing some sort of follow-up to The Simpsons Movie.
Maybe Disney can take some notes from how Crunchyroll is doing it, because Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero ($20m)has just kicked the ass of The Bob’s Burgers Movie’s ($12.4m) in first week release numbers and is poised to topple The Bob’s Burgers Movie’s entire theatrical run probably as soon as next weekend.
The film marks the widest theatrical release ever for Crunchyroll in North America with 4,000+ screens in over 3100+ theaters. It is also the largest footprint of premium formats including IMAX, 4DX, Dolby Cinemas, MX4d, and DBox. The film, directed by Tetsuro Kodama with deep involvement from Dragon Ball’s original creator Akira Toriyama.
Even more embarrassing for Disney, Deadline is reporting that Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero not only got a big marketing push from social media, but also TV spots airing across multiple networks that feature adult animation programming, like Adult Swim (36.3%), Comedy Central (31.4%),and FX (30.6%) with big series like South Park (17.7%), King of the Hill (8.2%) and American Dad (7.2%) taking a lion’s share of the contributions to Dragon Ball’s success. That means, Disney literally had the blueprint right in front of them on their own networks and failed to capitalize.
Adult animation audiences take care of themselves. Hollywood is still not getting it.
Read our review of Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero here.
Do we know if Hulu will be the only entity to have the dub, or if it will be on other platforms, too? The show in general is definitely going to be on multiple platforms.