CITY OF EMBER

City Of Ember

Walden Media financed this $55 million film with their Walden-Fox marketing partnership set to distribute City Of Ember in the US. Before release, FOX absorbed the Walden marketing branch, laid off 12 employees and the film was dumped, but not before Walden spent a ton of money to create a train ride to advertise the film at Comic-Con months before. With scaled back marketing from FOX, the film opened in 2,022 theaters to an awful $3,129,473 — placing outside the top 10 at #11 for the weekend led by holdover Beverly Hills Chihuahua and Ember opened behind two new flops Body Of Lies and The Express. City Of Ember declined 44.7% in its second weekend to $1,730,755 and promptly lost most of its theater count. The pic closed its US run with only $7,873,007 at the box office, returning about $4.2 million after theaters take their percentage of the gross. FOX never even bothered to release the film on Blu-ray in the US and stripped all extras off the DVD. Summit sold the overseas rights, which sold very well to distributors who also dumped the film. City of Ember pulled in $10,056,677 overseas and went straight to video in Germany, Sweden, Japan and Brazil. Domestic home video sales were a weak $7.1 million (less after resellers take their cut and manufacturing costs).