We at The Playlist noticed a news item in the Hollywood Reporter about ABBA- centric “Mamma Mia!” being one of the top grossing movies worldwide for 2008. The earnings so far have been largely in overseas markets but the film also had the largest opening weekend of any musical in U.S. history (well, just barely beating out “Hairspray”). The movie has even garnered it’s own sing-a-long version, for that extra special ABBA experience. This thing started as a West End play in 1999 and since then has grossed over $2 billion worldwide.
The guys at The Playlist want me to write something about the power of the female consumer or something – some article they probably should have written circa “Sex and the City.” Granted, for opening weekend of “Mamma Mia!” the audience was 75% female and 64% of those females were over 30 (per EW), but it opened against “The Dark Knight” for pity’s sake. My mother is never going to see the new Batman movie, not even on DVD. And it only made $27.6 M to Batman’s $155.3M in the U.S. that weekend, with the two movies accounting for 75% of the box office total.
I think we can largely attribute the amazing success of “Mamma Mia!” to the certain European and Asian countries who love truly awful music. If you look at overseas grosses ‘Mamma’ is projected to break $300M by next week while ‘Dark Knight’ is currently at about $438M. Those are amazingly close overseas earnings for two movies who aren’t in the same ballpark as each other in the U.S ($136.6M vs. $512.3M respectively) . Once ‘Mamma’ opens in France & India next week, forget about it. Those countries LOVE crappy music!
I suppose this could be a victory for upper demo female consumers in the U.S. but as a borderline upper demo U.S. woman I strongly prefer to blame the Europeans’ terrible taste in music for this one. I mean, Elbow just beat Radiohead for the Mercury Prize this year too but that doesn’t make it right.