By winning the box office this past weekend, "Crazy Rich Asians" proved to Hollywood that the world is ready and hungry for films led by Asian casts. But the film's success could also mean a comeback for the big-screen romantic comedy.
The film's debut exceeded box-office expectations, with most recent numbers from Warner Bros. putting it at $35.3 million for the first five days, including $26.5 million from Friday to Sunday, according to comScore. "Crazy Rich Asians" opened in 3,384 theaters and cost a modest $30 million before marketing. By contrast, "The Joy Luck Club," the last major Hollywood film with a majority Asian cast, played in no more than 600 theaters after its 1993 release.
"Films like 'Crazy Rich Asians' have universal themes that everyone can look to. [Warner Bros.] marketed this as a movie for everyone, and it worked out brilliantly," said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at comScore.
Based on a best-selling novel by Singaporean-American author Kevin Kwan, "Crazy Rich Asians" follows a New York University professor who accompanies her boyfriend back to his home in Singapore for his best friend's wedding and discovers he comes from one of Singapore's richest families. Relationship and family drama ensue as she navigates the mostly hidden world of the ultrawealthy.
Rom-coms, as well as comedies in general, have stumbled at the box office in recent years, following the distant era of Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts blockbusters.
"Think Like a Man 2" was the last rom-com to open at No. 1 when it was released in 2014, according to Dergarabedian. The following year, Amy Schumer's R-rated "Trainwreck" was the last rom-com to earn a total over $100 million. Her more recent comedies ("Snatched," "I Feel Pretty") have been less successful.
The success of "Crazy Rich Asians" may be a test case for studios to see if romantic comedy can still generate buzz and do well in theaters in the era of video-on-demand. Netflix is turning out a steady stream of the kind of rom-coms Hollywood used to. Its recent hit, "Set it Up," which generated significant media buzz, is a contemporary version of the successful '90s and 2000s rom-coms. The genre is thriving on streaming services because of the minimal buy-in from subscribers — viewers looking for often formulaic satisfaction without having to leave their living rooms.
Meanwhile, Hollywood is forgoing these mid-budget summer movies for blockbuster action and cheap horror flicks. Rom-com budgets are usually relatively low, but their high marketing costs mean a streaming-service release is a safer bet, said Dergarabedian.
Yet in light of this state of the industry, the creators of "Crazy Rich Asians" turned down a tempting deal with upfront seven-figure paydays from Netflix, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Director Jon M. Chu and Kwan, who was also executive producer, wanted the first major Hollywood movie with an Asian-American ensemble in 25 years on the big screen, along with all the publicity and precedence it entailed. A successful theatrical release would emphasize the good business of diversity proved in recent years by films like "Black Panther" and "Get Out."
"If the movie came out on Netflix, you would never know how well it did. Netflix doesn't release data on individual projects, and so there's no way to prove to other studios that hey, 'Crazy Rich Asians' made money and people wanted to see it," Hollywood Reporter's Rebecca Sun told CNBC's Power Lunch on Friday.
(CNN) Ken Jeong is still pinching himself over the success of "Crazy Rich Asians."
"This is beyond expected for all of us," Jeong told CNN at the MTV VMAs on Monday night. "It's been highly emotional for the whole cast and crew. The fans have spoken ... I'm so grateful to the fans and it just shows that it's time."
"Crazy Rich Asians," made $35 million dollars at the US box office over its five day opening, exceeding projections. Jeong is one of the stars of the film, based on Kevin Kwan's best selling book of the same name. The movie also stars Constance Wu and Henry Golding.
The last time a major Hollywood film featured a predominately Asian cast was 1993's "The Joy Luck Club."
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Constance Wu seems so well-suited to her role as Rachel Chu in the box-office hit Crazy Rich Asians that it’s hard to imagine any other actress playing the coveted part.
But in an alternative reality, the role could have been given to a white actress. As Kevin Kwan, author of the novel upon which the movie is based and executive producer of the film adaptation, told Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross in a recent interview, one of the producers who initially approached him to option his book said the offer was contingent on rewriting the role of Asian-American economist Rachel Chu as a white girl.
Kwan didn’t bother responding, but he wasn’t particularly surprised. As he told Gross:
This was back in 2013. So this was way before the whole Hollywood whitewashing movement began, before all the waves of outrage that happened — justifiably so, with the casting of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, things like that. So it was early days yet, and I knew that this movie would be a challenge because I knew it needed an all-Asian cast, and so I knew that a lot of traditional Hollywood would find it to be not a viable project, and so that’s why I chose to go the team that I did. We thought we would really produce this outside of the studio system and it would be an independent film. … It’s taken on a whole other life that I never dreamed was possible.
The producer’s original offer speaks to the degree to which whitewashing is ingrained in the Hollywood mindset. It’s also perplexing, given that a large degree of Kwan’s plot explores the tensions between Rachel, as an “American-born Chinese,” and her boyfriend’s pedigree-obsessed family in Singapore. Had Rachel been white, much of the plot’s incisive exploration of Asian identity would have been lost entirely.
And, of course, the film likely wouldn’t have been considered such a triumph of representation in white-centric Hollywood. Kimberly Yam, the Asian voices editor for HuffPost, recently summed up the significance of the all-Asian cast in a poignant Twitter thread.
