The news for DreamWorks Animation’s Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken didn’t get better on Independence Day, with the movie ranking in ninth place for the holiday. Even worse, it could only manage a per screen average of $294. Ouch! So far, the comedy has limped to just $7 million after five days of release. For those keeping score, that’s even lower than what the studio’s much publicized flop Sinbad: Legend of the Seas managed over the same period twenty years ago!
Some might claim the 65% “freshness” rating over at Rotten Tomatoes wasn’t enough to get folks excited, but it’s easy to see what really went wrong here. Universal absolutely dropped the ball in terms of marketing on Ruby, essentially “announcing” the film with a trailer just three months before its release date. That’s not enough time to get people excited for an original property, especially since it was going up against a Pixar release (Elemental) and a critically adored superhero movie (Across the Spider-Verse) for its target demographic. Why not save it for mid-July, when there are no major animated releases set to come out? Or even just hold it until autumn?
In any case, it seems safe to say that Ruby was more or less thrown away. There simply wasn’t a big sales push for this one on Universal’s part. It’s not like the movie couldn’t have found an audience, as it looked extremely kid-friendly in a Disney Channel Original Movie kind of way. Next up for DreamWorks is Trolls Band Together, which will probably outdo Ruby’s entire box office gross during its first weekend of release. It is set to come out on November 17th, where it will face off against Lionsgate’s The Hunger Games prequel. Gillman, meanwhile, is expected to be released on home digital platforms by the end of the month.
