Replicas

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    [Total: 109 Average: 2.1]
  • Directed By: Jeffrey Nachmanoff
  • Written By: Chad St. John
  • Release Date: January 11, 2019
  • Domestic Distributor: Entertainment Studios
  • Cast: Keanu Reeves, Alice Eve, Emily Alyn Lind

Box Office Info:
Budget: $30 MILLION Financed by: Riverstone Pictures; Remstar Studios
Domestic Gross: $4,046,429 Overseas Gross: $5,283,646

Plot Synopsis: A brilliant neuroscientist (Keanu Reeves) — Whoa, we’ll stop there —  that requires the viewer to demolish suspension of disbelief, though Riverstone Pictures and Remstar Studios thought that casting was a good enough idea to finance Replicas.  The cost of the mid-budget production has not been released by the financiers.

Lotus Entertainment was tapped to handle international pre-sales, which kicked off at the 2014 American Film Market.  Sales continued at the European Film Market in Berlin in 2015 and then Cannes.  Filming completed in 2016 and most international markets were sold out, but no domestic distributor had been locked.  CAA handled the stateside rights and took the picture to the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival in September and held private buyers screenings, as the movie was not included in the TIFF program.

Byron Allen’s Entertainment Studios paid $4M for the US rights with a wide release commitment.  The fledgling distributor dated this stinker for the January dumping ground on the 11th.  Entertainment aided the release with a modest, but still pricey P&A spend — iSpotTV reported $8.27M in TV ads one week before the release and millions more would be spent up to the opening.  After other traditional means of advertising and distribution expenses, the P&A costs were certainly north of $20M.

Replicas was not screened for critics and the reviews that eventually posted were abysmal.  Making matters worse for its commercial potential were high quality pirated copies of the movie online.  It bowed against The Upside and A Dog’s Way Home and tracking was pointing to a mid single digit opening.  Replicas was dead on arrival with $2,375,325 — placing #13 for the weekend led by The Upside.  It marked the lowest grossing wide opening (in over 1,000 theaters) of Keanu’s career.  Audiences gave the movie a dreadful C cinemascore and the embarrassing opening numbers were followed by the 9th largest second weekend decline on record at 81.5% to $439,371.  It was then pulled out of all but 84 theaters going into its third frame and closed its domestic run with just $4,046,429.

Replicas has been released in about a dozen offshore markets, where it has barely made a blip at the box office.  The current cume is near $4M with $2.2M of that coming from Russia.  The overseas numbers will be updated if this lands a theatrical run anywhere else…

6 Comments

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  1. I thought there were enough people who would see any movie with Keanu in it to at least get this movie to double digits.

    I was wrong.

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