Sherlock Gnomes
- Rate Movie[Total: 34 Average: 2.3]
- Directed By: John Stevenson
- Written By: Ben Zazove
- Release Date: March 23, 2018
- Domestic Distributor: Paramount
- Cast: Johnny Depp, James McAvoy, Emily Blunt
Box Office Info:
Budget: $59 million | Financed by: Paramount; MGM |
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Domestic Box Office: $43,242,871 | Overseas Box Office: $47,103,000 |
Sherlock Gnomes began development in 2012, one year after Gnomeo & Juliet (2011) pulled in $193M at the worldwide box office on a modest $36M budget. Disney had financed and released the first installment for Elton John‘s production company Rocket Pictures and Sherlock Gnomes was expected to begin production in early 2013 but the mouse house pulled out of the project. Two years later Rocket Pictures got Sherlock Gnomes back into active development at Paramount Animation and MGM, which felt this Gnome nonsense had franchise potential.
The production was mostly outsourced to Paris, after France increased their tax rebate structure for animation from 20% to 30%. The budget for Sherlock Gnomes was $59 million, which Paramount majority financed and MGM contributed 1/3 of the expenses and retained international TV rights. Paramount would handle distribution in most markets. Sherlock Gnomes was first dated for January 12, 2018 and then pushed back to March 23.
Sherlock Gnomes would mark the third project to emerge from Paramount Animation after their inaugural feature The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water (2015) and then the box office fiasco Monster Trucks (2017). Paramount Animation had also opted to dump their wonderful negative pickup The Little Prince (2016) over to Netflix instead of releasing it.
Paramount gave Sherlock Gnomes a strong marketing push and invested $20.67M into TV ads (as per iSpotTV) and after other traditional means of advertising and distribution expenses, the P&A costs were far north of $35M. Sherlock Gnomes bowed against Pacific Rim Uprising, Paul, Apostle of Christ, Midnight Sun and Unsane. Tracking was pointing to an opening between $15M – $18M but reviews were largely very negative and it came in far below estimates at $10,604,774 — placing #4 for the weekend led by Pacific Rim Uprising. It dipped 34% to $7,001,570 in its second frame and had a modest 22.4% third session decline to $5,436,068 but then sank 55.8% to $2,404,661 in its 4th weekend. The domestic run closed with a poor $43,242,871.
Gnomeo & Juliet had pulled in $94M from its overseas run and Sherlock Gnomes also suffered from diminishing returns. The offshore cume stalled at $47.1M.
And, don’t forget the limited release of the wonderful stop-motion “Isle of Dogs” was competing against him, as well!!!
Isle of Dogs did not cater to the same audience as Sherlock Gnomes.