“Wonka,” a look at the early days of a wacky chocolatier, debuted to $3.5 million in Thursday previews.
The family film is hoping to become a holiday favorite for moviegoers with kids. To that end, Warner Bros., the studio behind the $125 million confection, is betting that the movie shows some impressive endurance, continuing to attract crowds in the market for some PG-rated fare when schools close down next week. It’s on track to open to roughly $35 million this weekend. Its Thursday preview results are exactly the same as those for 2018’s “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” — that film earned just over $35 million in its inaugural weekend and topped out at just under $200 million domestically.
Timothée Chalamet, last seen discovering that “fear is the mind killer” in “Dune” and acquiring a taste for human flesh in “Bones and All,” gets to flex his cuddly side as Willy Wonka, a role previously played by Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp. He heads an ensemble cast that includes Olivia Colman, Keegan-Michael Key, Sally Hawkins and Hugh Grant as an Oompa-Loompa. The film was directed byPaul King, the filmmaker who put a fresh coat of whimsy on another beloved children’s classic, “Paddington.”
Critics have been kind, praising the film as a worthy take on the Roald Dahl character and handing “Wonka” an impressive 83% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes. PvNew‘s Owen Gleiberman liked the film (with a few reservations), calling it a “fun, rousing, impeccably staged, jaw-droppingly old-fashioned musical prequel.”
The next weeks will bring a number of high-profile releases, such as “Migration,” an animated adventure from Illumination and Universal, as well as Warner’s musical adaptation of “The Color Purple” and “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,” a return trip to Atlantis that will battle with comic book movie fatigue. Even if all of these movies succeed, theater owners feel like this holiday season will pale in comparison to the last two, which saw the release of “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and “Avatar: The Way of Water,” two of the highest-grossing films of all time.
