Crazy Rich Asians: Box Office Breakdown

Since Crazy Rich Asians (CRA) is now out on home release and largely out theaters, it’s time for a rundown of its quite impressive box office performance. As an asterisk, CRA opens in its final foreign market, China, on November 30th. While the China box office has become hugely important to American produced movies, CRA’s performance there is largely unpredictable (due to several different factors) and it has already made enough money and had a small enough budget to be wildly successful regardless of its performance there.

CRA is a Warner Brothers production based on Kevin Kwan’s novel of the same name. Kwan turned down an offer for a complete trilogy with creative freedom and a massive payday from Netflix in order to have CRA be the first American studio film with a completely Asian cast since Disney’s 1993 The Joy Luck Club. He also wanted movie studios to get back in the business of making romcoms. As studios have become more franchise and foreign market focused, smaller budget genres like romcoms haven’t gotten as much monetary love. CRA is the first romcom to make over $100m at the box office since 2015’s Amy Schumer movie, Trainwreck. That’s not to say that there haven’t been good or successful romcoms in the meantime, they’ve simply been on streaming services or indie movies. CRA became the 6th highest grossing rom-com at the US box office with a total of $173,886,05 and is the only romcom of the 2010s to be in the top ten. 2009’s The Proposal is the movie in the top ten whose release date is the closest to CRA’s release in August 2018.

CRA was a US heavy movie. As said above, its domestic box office was $173,886,058. Its global total (without China) is $236,586,058 for a 74%/26% domestic to foreign split. Opening weekend the movie took in $26,510,140 for a 6.56x domestic multiplier (total/opening weekend). CRA stayed at the number one spot at the domestic box office for its first three weekends and didn’t drop out of the top five until its seventh weekend. It managed to stay in the top ten for 8 weeks. CRA’s domestic performance was incredibly leggy. It only made 14.2% less in its second week than its first. There was an even more impressive hold in its third week at an 8.2% percent drop. The only week it made less than half of its previous week was its 9th week when it began to lose more theaters and as Venom and A Star is Born began to eat into its market. Australia was CRA’s best foreign market with a $26,510,140 take, followed by the UK with $7,398,744, and Indonesia with $5,500,000.

American studios prefer movies to have a higher domestic take as they keep more of the money and with only a $30 million budget, CRA was surely highly profitable. It made 5.8x its production budget in the US and 2.09x overseas with a total budget multiplier of 7.89x. CRA is surely to be in the top ten most profitable movies (in terms of return on investment, not in raw dollars) of 2018, especially if it does well in China. The $30m budget is the production budget and doesn’t take into account things like marketing and residuals to financiers, cast, and crew. However, even if we say that the total budget is twice the production budget, it’s still looking at around $175 million profit which would be 2.93x the full budget.

There are already plans to shoot the sequel China Rich Girlfriend with the director, writers, and cast all signed on however it will be a bit before anything happens officially. Director Jon Chu has Into the Heights in the pipeline for a June 2020 release and star Constance Wu is busy with her ABC show Fresh Off the Boat. We likely will not see the sequel until 2021. Hopefully, the runaway success of this movie will show studios that diversity works and that a movie doesn’t have to have a huge budget or be part of some connected universe to be successful.

Crazy Rich Asians at a glance:

Studio: Warner Brothers

Director: Jon Chu

Cast: Constance Wu, Henry Golding, Gemma Chan, Lisa Lu, Awkwafina, Ken Jeong, and Michelle Yeoh

Genre: Romantic Comedy

Release Date: August 15th, 2018

Production budget: $30,000,000

Total budget (estimated): $50,000,000- $60,000,000

Estimated profit: $150 million - $175 million

US Box Office Total:  $173,886,058

Foreign Box Office Total : $62,700,000

Worldwide Box Office Total : $236,586,058

Foreign/Domestic Split: 74 %/ 26%