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Hanna Movie Box Office: Woman-Centered Thriller Underperforms

Hanna movie Saoirse RonanHanna movie with Saoirse Ronan: Directed by Joe Wright, the female-centered action thriller will have a difficult time to as much as match is modest production budget at the domestic box office.
  • Hanna movie box office: Starring Saoirse Ronan as a teenage assassin trainee, Eric Bana as her ex-CIA father/trainer, and Cate Blanchett as the current CIA official who wants them both dead, Focus Features’ Joe Wright-directed thriller is doing weak business domestically and has little chance of recovering its modest budget at the global box office.

Hanna movie box office: Starring Saoirse Ronan and Cate Blanchett, Joe Wright’s female-centered thriller is performing at the low end of the scale

Ramon Novarro biography Beyond Paradise

April 8–10 weekend box office: Four new wide releases – the action thriller Hanna, the romantic comedy Arthur, the Christian drama Soul Surfer, the spoof Your Highness – have failed to unseat Universal Pictures’ live-action/animated fantasy adventure Hop, which topped the North American (U.S. and Canada only) box office chart for the second weekend in a row, grossing an okay $21.3 million (down 43 percent; cume: $67.8 million) according to final studio figures found at boxofficemojo.com.

At no. 2, Focus Features’ woman-centered Hanna earned $12.4 million from 2,535 locations (average: $4,879). That’s hardly an auspicious debut for the $30 million (as always, not including marketing and distribution expenses) Anglo-German-American production directed by Joe Wright and starring Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan (Atonement, 2007) as a young woman trained by her dedicated ex-CIA father (Munich’s distraught but deadly Mossad agent Eric Bana) to become a professional assassin.

For comparison’s sake: Three weekends ago, Neil Burger’s Limitless, starring Bradley Cooper and Abbie Cornish, debuted with $18.9 million from 2,756 locations (average: $6,860). Two weekends before that, George Nolfi’s The Adjustment Bureau, starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, opened with $21.2 million from 2,840 locations (average: $7,449). And just last week, Duncan Jones’ better-received Source Code, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, opened with $14.8 million from 2,961 sites (average: $5,002).

In sum, Hanna opened at the very low end of the adult-oriented-thriller scale and, unlike The Bourne Identity, it’s not about to lead to any female-focused sequels.

Hanna beats Arthur

Having said that – and despite a mediocre 57 percent approval rating among Rotten Tomatoes’ “top critics” – Hanna actually performed better than expected (the bar was pretty low), thus beating Warner Bros.’ far more heavily marketed romantic comedy Arthur, the panned remake of the studio’s 1981 blockbuster starring Dudley Moore.

Also in the Hanna cast: Oscar winner Cate Blanchett (The Aviator, 2004) as a senior CIA agent out to eliminate both the young assassin and her father, John Macmillan, Michelle Dockery, Olivia Williams, Jason Flemyng, and Tom Hollander.

Global underperformer

Update: Joe Wright-Saoirse Ronan collaboration Hanna ultimately collected only $40.3 million domestically (yet it did manage to earn more than its production budget in the U.S. and Canada) and an even more dispiriting $23.5 million (likely incomplete) internationally. Worldwide total: $63.8 million.

That was far from enough for the woman-focused action thriller to break even at the box office.

Its top international markets were the United Kingdom/Ireland ($6.1 million), Germany ($2.9 million), Russia/CIS ($2 million), Australia ($1.9 million), Spain ($1.5 million), and South Korea ($1.5 million).


Hanna Movie Box Office” endnotes

Unless otherwise noted, “Hanna Movie Box Office: Woman-Centered Thriller Underperforms” box office information via Box Office Mojo. Budget info – which should be taken with a grain of salt – via BOM and/or other sources (e.g., the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Screen Daily, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Deadline.com, etc.).

Comments about Hanna and other titles being hits/profitable or flops/money-losers at the box office (see paragraph below) are based on the available data about their production budget, additional marketing and distribution expenses (as a general rule of thumb, around 50 percent of the production cost), and worldwide gross (as a general rule of thumb when it comes to the Hollywood studios, around 50–55 percent of the domestic gross and 40 percent of the international gross goes to the distributing/producing companies).

Bear in mind that data regarding rebates, domestic/international sales/pre-sales, and other credits and/or contractual details that help to alleviate/split production costs and apportion revenues are oftentimes unavailable, and that reported international grosses may be incomplete (i.e., not every territory is fully – or even partially – accounted for).

Also bear in mind that ancillary revenues (domestic/global television rights, home video sales, streaming, merchandising, etc.) can represent anywhere between 40–70 percent of a movie’s total take. However, these revenues and their apportionment are only infrequently made public.

Saoirse Ronan Hanna movie image: Focus Features.

Hanna Movie Box Office: Woman-Centered Thriller Underperforms” last updated in February 2023.

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