'Warcraft' is as beloved outside the U.S. as it is hated here
Warcraft is an unexpected runaway success -- but you wouldn't know it looking at the U.S. box office.
The Universal Pictures film adaptation of the online role-playing game, World of Warcraft, has won few fans in the press. It also saw a significant drop in U.S. ticket sales from week one to week two, shedding 73 percent of its audience on the road to a $6.5 million second weekend. It has all the earmarks of a bust.
Then you look at the overseas numbers, particularly in China. Outside the U.S., Warcraft has earned summer blockbuster-level ticket sales of almost $340 million.
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It's a success by any measure for a film that was said to be budgeted at around $160 million. Plenty of Hollywood blockbusters perform better overseas than at home, but the differential on Warcraft is striking: 90 percent of its global ticket sales to date have come from outside the U.S.
Not many movies on the scale of Warcraft can claim such a steep differential between domestic popularity and overseas popularity. The Transformers films -- which have traditionally fared well with foreign audiences -- come close.
Transformers: Age of Extinction earned roughly $1.1 billion worldwide in 2014, and 77.2% of those sales happened outside of U.S. borders. In the same category are Resident Evil: Retribution ($240.2 million, 82.4% overseas), The Expendables 3 ($206.2 million, 80.9%) and Terminator Genisys ($435.9 million, 79.4%), among others.
Credit the lingering popularity of the subscription-based game that partially inspired the movie. Massively multiplayer games like WoW are popular in China, where restrictive laws made PC gaming the only option for Chinese gamers until very recently.
So while Warcraft may be fighting a losing battle in the U.S., its numbers in China and elsewhere overseas have probably still made some folks at Universal quite happy about it.
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Topics Film
Adam Rosenberg is a Senior Games Reporter for Mashable, where he plays all the games. Every single one. From AAA blockbusters to indie darlings to mobile favorites and browser-based oddities, he consumes as much as he can, whenever he can.Adam brings more than a decade of experience working in the space to the Mashable Games team. He previously headed up all games coverage at Digital Trends, and prior to that was a long-time, full-time freelancer, writing for a diverse lineup of outlets that includes Rolling Stone, MTV, G4, Joystiq, IGN, Official Xbox Magazine, EGM, 1UP, UGO and others.Born and raised in the beautiful suburbs of New York, Adam has spent his life in and around the city. He's a New York University graduate with a double major in Journalism and Cinema Studios. He's also a certified audio engineer. Currently, Adam resides in Crown Heights with his dog and his partner's two cats. He's a lover of fine food, adorable animals, video games, all things geeky and shiny gadgets.
