BURNT

Burnt

Burnt was first set up at Sony before the project found its way over to The Weinstein Company and was originally titled Chef and pre-sales at Cannes happened the same time as Jon Favreau was pre-selling his Chef picture. Sony sent a cease and desist letter to Favreau and the producers on the competing Chef title, but Favreau’s picture made it to market first and the title was cleared. This Bradley Cooper vehicle was retitled Adam Jones, before being changed again to Burnt. The Weinstein Company financed the pic and selling off overseas distribution limits their exposure to the $32,720,685 budget (as per records from the Louisiana film commission). It was first dated for October 2 and then moved to October 23, where TWC planned on a limited release to spread word of mouth before going wide. In early October, the limited release was scrapped and the date pushed back a week to October 30, where it open very wide in 3,003 theaters.

The Weinstein Company gave Burnt a modest, but still pricey domestic P&A spend, with $12.3 million in television ads going into release and millions more in print, online, poster, virtual print fees, etc. Burnt was poorly received by critics and opened against the flop Sandra Bullock vehicle Our Brand Is Crisis and Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse. It also saw competition from better reviewed adult fare The Martian and Bridge Of Spies, which were still playing strong at the box office. Burnt pulled in a terrible weekend gross of $5,002,521 — placing #6 for the weekend led by the 5th frame of The Martian. Burnt‘s opening numbers were the 4th worst for a film playing in over 3,000 theaters and it joined other recent adult targeting movies Steve Jobs and The Walk which struggled to bring in auds. The film saw a 42.3% second frame decline to $2,887,029 and then sank 61% to $1,127,264 in its third frame and promptly lost most of its theater count. Burnt closed its domestic run with $13,651,946. TWC would see back about $7.4 million after theaters take their percentage of the gross.

In an interview with the NY Times, Harvey Weinstein felt Burnt would have worked better as a January release, but his company’s board enforced that a certain amount of films be released each quarter and it was forced into its October slot. This marks the third dud Cooper opened in 2015 after the delayed and troubled Serena and the summer flop Aloha.

Overseas, Burnt pulled in $22.9 million across numerous distributors, with just $2.4 million from France as the highest gross.