The Color Purple Box Office To Zip Past Major Milestone, Defying Expectations
BY
BRENNAN KLEIN
PUBLISHED 22 HOURS AGO
The new musical adaptation of The Color Purple quickly passes an important milestone at the domestic box office over New Year's weekend.
Smiling Woman in The Color Purple 2023
SUMMARY
The Color Purple surpasses box office expectations, projected to earn over $50 million domestically by the end of the 4-day weekend.
The movie adaptation quickly enters the Top 50 highest-performing domestic releases of 2023 in just eight days.
The film centers on Celie, an African American woman who finds independence through sisterhood in the early 1900s American South.
The Color Purple is exceeding expectations as it quickly passes a major box office milestone. The new movie musical is an adaptation of the 2005 Broadway show of the same name, which itself is an adaptation of Alice Walker's iconic 1982 novel. The movie opened at No. 1 on Christmas Day, though it eventually took fourth place at the box office for the week, behind Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Wonka, and Migration.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, the The Color Purple box office is now projected to exceed expectations by earning a domestic gross of $17.7 million by the end of the 4-day New Year's weekend. This will bring its cumulative domestic total to over $50 million, quickly passing that major commercial milestone. In doing so, it will dash onto the chart of the Top 50 highest-performing domestic releases of 2023 in just eight days.
How The Color Purple Compares To Other Major 2023 Blockbusters
Shug embracing Celie in The Color Purple
The Color Purple release was already projected to earn more than $100 million at the domestic box office. However, its gross for its first full weekend in theaters shows that it may perform even better than that, climbing quickly up the chart. At the time of writing, only 23 movies from 2023 have passed the $100 million milestone at the box office, meaning the new musical will likely halve the distance between its current chart position and the top (which is occupied by the smash hit Barbie, with $636.2 million) by the end of its run.
The Color Purple musical has also performed well in terms of movie musicals for the year. In fact, it is already the fifth highest-grossing movie musical of 2023 at the domestic box office, not including the blockbuster concert movie Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour. Below, check out how quickly The Color Purple reached $50 million compared to the next highest-grossing 2023 musicals, as well as the total domestic grosses of those other titles:
Title
$50 Million Day
Total Domestic Gross
The Color Purple
Day 8 - $50 million+
TBD
Wish
Day 21 - $50.3 million
$59.8 million
Trolls Band Together
Day 8 - $54.1 million
$96.3 million
Wonka
Day 6 - $53.3 million
$119.2 million (in progress)
The Little Mermaid
Day 2 - $68.3 million
$298.1 million
Precedent shows that The Color Purple will easily surpass Wish to become the fourth highest-grossing musical of the year. While the numbers for Trolls Band Together would seem to indicate that the new movie is trailing behind, the nature of holiday releases is to have consistent week-on-week growth rather than splashy openings, so Purple could easily pull ahead. Ultimately, it seems that it will land somewhere slightly below Wonka's total gross, which is currently unknown but will place Purple as the No. 3 musical of the year.
Source: THR
https://screenrant.com/color-purple-2023-movie-box-office-opening-milestone/
