Heading into its sixth weekend in release, Searchlight Pictures’ deliciously provocative thriller The Menu has proved to be a rare delicacy this year – an adult-skewing film that has prospered at the box office, serving up more than $65m worldwide and counting.
Mark Mylod’s (Succession, Game Of Thrones) satire about a group of diners who visit an exclusive restaurant for a truly unforgettable experience stands at more than $32.7m in North America, where it ranked fifth last weekend, mixing it up with behemoths Avatar: The Way of Water, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and heavyweight studio fare like Violent Night and Strange World.
The spectacle starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Fiennes and Nicholas Hoult opened over the November 18-20 session on 3,211 theatres and placed second on $9m, behind the second weekend of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
Last weekend it played in 1,875 sites and has averaged 34% drops in its first month – a sign that strong word of mouth continues to draw crowds from the leading national circuits like AMC, Regal and Cinemark to arthouse venues in Brooklyn.
Box office milestones
In that time it has become Searchlight’s highest grossing North American release since Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 best picture Oscar winner The Shape Of Water finished on $66m. Already in the rearview mirror is Searchlight’s Isle Of Dogs (2018, $32m) and The Menu is about to surpass JoJo Rabbit (2019, $33.37m) and The Favourite (2018, $34.37m). it is not inconceivable to suggest it could finish higher than 2015’s Brooklyn, which finished on $38.32m.
Internationally the picture is similarly rosy. A $33.1m-plus overall box office has been powered by impressive results led by $3.99m in the UK, where Comscore PostTrak’s exit polling service reported 50% of the opening weekend audience was aged under 24 and 25% aged between 25 and 34 – all with a roughly even male-female split.
Germany has delivered $2.54m, Australia $2.5m, Italy $2.14m, and France $2.11m. The film has embedded itself in the top five for at least four weeks in the UK and Australia, and the top four for the same period of time in the likes of Saudi Arabia, New Zealand and Argentina.
Expected to play robustly through the holiday season during weekends and mid-week The Menu is forecast by industry sources to finish in the $70m-$75m worldwide box office range, a standout performance for a film believed to have cost around $25m at a time when other acclaimed prestige fare have struggled.
“You just can’t move the picture out, be it in arthouse or big auditoriums,” says Frank Rodriguez, SVP, general sales manager at Searchlight Pictures. “It’s stylish, it’s cool. The fact is people love something that’s a little bit different, especially the edgy, young audiences.”
According to PostTrak some 63% of the opening weekend audience was aged between 18 and 34 with a roughly even male-female split. “It’s been very good in Los Angeles and a lot of places but it’s really struck a chord in in Manhattan and Brooklyn,” says Rodriguez. ”We’ve been doing tremendously in the hipster theatres in Brooklyn [Nitehawk, Williamsburg, Alamo] and places like Alamo Drafthouse and Regal Union Square [in Manhattan]. The other night it was number three at [AMC] Lincoln Square [in Manhattan].”
Adds Rebecca Kearey, Searchlight’s head of international and business operations: “We’re finding a really great crossover audience: it’s working in upscale sites and in multiplexes, so it’s that rare breed that satisfies a lot of the audience groups.”
Threading the needle
Opting for a global November launch the distribution executives “threaded the needle”, as Rodriguez puts it. They wanted the late-year corridor favoured for adult fare and targeted the Thanksgiving holiday period in the US, launching on the eve of the World Cup in Qatar and at a busy time on the Disney/Searchlight release calendar.
“We had other films such as The Banshees Of Inisherin and Empire Of Light after that, and then Disney had their films Black Panther and Strange World, so we just had to thread the needle,” he says. ”We figured if we were on screens for Thanksgiving here in the US we could play really well.”
Searchlight created awareness and anticipation around the release through a string of prestige festival berths, starting with the world premiere in Toronto in September. “We wanted to use those fall film festivals, both domestically and internationally, because we thought the film would play really well to a film festival audience,” notes Kearey. “We programmed ourselves after Toronto as the surprise movie at multiple festivals including [BFI] London Film Festival. That was a really fun way for those audiences to experience it and really helped create that word of mouth.”
Taylor-Joy travelled to the UK to promote The Menu towards the end of her production schedule on George Miller’s Furiosa, the latest entry in the Mad Max universe. Hoult also actively promoted the film, while Fiennes did what he could in New York despite being on Broadway in David Hare’s Straight Line Crazy.
Playing to strengths
There is a sprinkling of key ingredients in The Menu and Searchlight leaned into the obvious one – food. “At the Toronto premiere we had the cheeseburger truck stationed outside,” says Kearey. “We did the same in Zurich. We went to our best film festivals in all of our territories and in the US in our lead into the release and in each one we pulled a different stunt involving food: some cheeseburger trucks, influencer foodie stations, and so on.”
Renowned chef Dominique Crenn, owner of the three-Michelin-star restaurant Atelier Crenn in San Francisco, had been a food advisor on the production and did publicity to support the release. Additionally, the studio teamed up with the Waitrose supermarket chain in the UK and ran a promotion in the latter’s in-house magazine.
“That’s a great place to be for this film because we’re playing to the strengths of people who like to go to upscale restaurants or like watching cooking shows,” says Kearey, “And there’s a lot of them.
“In Australia we did previews, we like exclusive Gold Class member screenings with Village [Cinemas] and Event [Cinemas] so what you’re getting for your ticket price is canapes, a glass of wine, a cake with gel in a syringe. We were able to partner with our key exhibitors to present something different with that food element and found ways to get our audiences to be more invested in the film. It worked well on that level.”
Besides the film’s success in multiplexes, Kearey notes how arthouse circuits enabled Searchlight and its exhibition partners to give audiences “a proper night out”. She continues, “Those arthouses like the Everymans, the Picturehouses, and Cinema Nova [in Australia], the Pathés and all the great arthouse chains, add a special sauce to this.”
In the US, Rodriguez reports that the IPIC circuit “pretty much booked up all their theatres”, as did other culinary circuits like Alamo, Spotlight Theatres and Cinepolis. “They all just jumped onto it… and it’s pretty much all still playing in a lot of those foodie theatres.”
Entering the sixth weekend (December 23-25) in North America The Menu will adjust to 900 theatres and Rodriguez says it will probably remain at that level throughout the holiday season. Now the hope is older audiences will engage, which would be the icing on the cake.
“When you have exhibitors like AMC and Regal and Cinemark assuring us [throughout the release that] this film is going to be one that makes it through and sure enough, we did, that gave us confidence the whole time.”
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