Daniel and the Fiery Furnace opened to $3.14 million from 1,525 North American theaters this weekend, according to The Numbers. Seventh place. $2,059 a screen.
Matthew and Daniel Kooman wrote and directed the live-action Book of Daniel picture for their Vancouver Island company, Unveil Studios. EKKL Entertainment put it into a real circuit without Angel Studios and without Come and See. Mena Massoud plays Daniel. Elijah Alexander, from The Chosen, plays Nebuchadnezzar. Massoud is also a producer. The MPA rated it PG-13 for strong violence and bloody images. Runtime is 108 minutes.
3 min read
The map filled. The rooms did not.
A week ago the question was whether Daniel could fill a thousand screens without Angel. The booking came in high. 1,525 theaters is more than the thousand the Kooman brothers had been selling. Harkins, Cinemark, and Fandango had showtimes listed before Friday. The occupancy is the $2,059.
Friday did $1.06 million, $695 a theater, good for sixth place that day. Saturday rose 12 percent to $1.19 million. Sunday dropped 25 percent to $890,000, eighth for the day, and the weekend settled at seventh. Divide $2,059 by a $12 ticket and you get about 170 people per theater across three days. A multiplex screen that ran four or five shows did not fill up. It hosted a small, faithful group and a lot of empty seats.
The weekend belonged to Sony’s Resident Evil reboot, which opened to $60 million. Daniel still had 1,525 rooms of its own. The test last week was whether Unveil’s list could occupy a real circuit. The list showed up. The circuit stayed mostly empty.
Rotten Tomatoes had the Popcornmeter at 94 percent Monday from more than 100 verified ratings, after the film’s account posted 96 percent over the weekend. Glenn Kenny, writing in The New York Times on Thursday, said the movie “barely manages to reach room temperature.” Peter T. Chattaway, in Christianity Today, called it “worth seeing” and “a major accomplishment for the Kooman brothers.” The people who bought a ticket liked the picture. There were not enough of them.
The official trailer EKKL and Unveil played into the September 18 opening. Watch on YouTube
A crowdfund can book a circuit
They shot in India with a lot of local performers. Chattaway liked that the film treats Daniel 1 through 3 as exile cinema, with Jeremiah in the first act, instead of another Moses or Jesus origin. He also liked Alexander’s Nebuchadnezzar, vain and curious in the same scene. Michael W. Smith is an executive producer. His son, Tyler Michael Smith, wrote the score. Unveil’s own site still sells a lions’ den follow-up. None of that changes $2,059 a screen.
The Koomans told American Family Radio they financed the picture through a crowdfund, then kept those backers in the booking fight. That list is not Angel’s Guild. It got the rooms onto Fandango. Filling them is a different job. Canadian dates were already narrower, about 30 Landmark cities with tickets on sale since September 13. A $2,059 average is what a wide independent Bible title looks like when the list shows up and the rest of the mall does not.
What Friday keeps
The Flood: End of Mankind is the next dated faith title, supposed to open in two weeks, still without tickets on the major sites as of Saturday. Daniel at least had showtimes a week ahead and a real circuit. Exhibitors who gave Unveil 1,525 screens will look at $2,059 and decide how many of those screens are still there next Friday. The open question is the hold, and whether the next independent Bible picture can do better than two thousand dollars a room.
