Despite a precipitous fall in its second weekend performance at the US box office, Warcraft has now become the most successful video game film ever.
China has turned Warcraft into the highest-grossing video game film ever
The movie bought in just $6.5 million in American theaters this past weekend (a fall of 73 percent compared to its $24 million opening), but continues to be buoyed by its massive success in China. Warcraft had the biggest debut of a foreign language film in the country’s history, pulling in $156 million in its first five days, and that figure has now risen to more than $200 million. Combined with revenue from its other international markets, that means Warcraft’s global box office takings now stand at some $378 million.
Warcraft's Chinese success means we can definitely expect a sequel
As the (partial) chart below shows, that’s enough to put the film in the top spot of the best-performing video game films, easily ahead of 2010’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and even this year’s The Angry Birds Movie. And compared to the reported $160 million it took to make Warcraft, close to $400 million is more than good going, and means we should definitely expect a sequel.
(Not shown in this graph: Japan and China-only titles, and the above movies’ terrible Rotten Tomatoes scores.)
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