The film scored one of the top openings ever for the 88-year-old star and director.
While Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse won the weekend box office race with a debut of $35.4 million thanks to kids and fanboys, Clint Eastwood’s The Mule scored a victory of its own by appealing to America’s heartland and decidedly older moviegoers.
The Mule, from Warner Bros., opened to $17.2 million to land one of the top starts ever for a film helmed by Eastwood, who remains Hollywood’s most prolific director at the age of 88. The Mule is actually the second film he directed this year, following The 15:17 to Paris, which was released in February. And although The Mule didn’t come close to equaling the $35 million opening of Sully in 2016 or the $89 million that American Sniperscored in its first weekend of wide release in 2015, it otherwise ranks as Eastwood’s best opening since 2000’s Space Cowboys, not adjusted for inflation.
Eastwood’s longevity in the business paid off as fans that he has acquired over the years turned out to see his latest film, which Nick Schenk (who also wrote Eastwood’s Gran Torino) adapted from a New York Times article about a senior citizen who became a drug runner for a Mexican cartel.
Senior ticket buyers were much in evidence, with more than half the film’s audience over the age of 35, including 17 percent over the age of 45 and 17 percent over the age of 55 (as a way of comparison, only 3 percent of ticket buyers to Spider-Verse were 55 and older). Moreover, 80 percent of those turning out to see The Mule were 35 and older.
That should give The Mule a key advantage as Hollywood heads into the lucrative Christmas season when a slew of all-audience films, including Mary Poppins Returns and Aquaman, will be competing with each other. The Mule‘s appeal is more targeted, and older moviegoers, who don’t always show up on opening weekend, can sustain a movie in its subsequent weeks.
“Clint’s audience may be aging, but they still want to see him on the big screen. And they still want to hear what he has to say, and how he says it,” says Jeff Goldstein, distribution chief for Warners.
The film’s older audience was reflected in the cities and towns where the movie played best. Generally, the top-grossing theaters for most films on any given weekend are in New York and Los Angeles. That wasn’t the case for The Mule.
(Excerpt) Read More at: HollywoodReporter.com