What the ‘Ticket to Paradise’ box office opening says about the state of the rom-com right now
The box office opening of The Ticket to Paradise at the Angelika Theater in New York City on Friday, Sept. 19, 2013.
NEW YORK, N.Y. – It’s been almost a year since The Ticket to Paradise opened at the Angelika Theater in New York City, and the first wave of ticket sales is in. The weekend’s ticket sales were $11.5 million, down 31% from last year at this time. But the box office is expected to reach a high of $5 million, and even if the weekend averages that figure the weekend could end up being the best weekend of the year for the film, which has a $4.8 million budget.
When the Angelika Theatre opened in the summer of 2013, it did so in a state of disrepair and, as the Los Angeles Times pointed out at the time, a state of “near collapse.” The Angelika and the neighboring Paramount Theatre, which opened right after it, sat empty, neglected, for five years. According to press books from the time, the Paramount was to be demolished, and a new theater was planned, but the site was never acquired and never did so. In fact, the New York Film Critics Circle gave it a rare, “noted” rating for bad acting and a plot so boring you wanted to pass it in a restaurant. The film has a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 95% on Metacritic, with audiences and critics having mixed reviews. The film was based on a novel by the late, great Philip Roth, which also won a Pulitzer for a short story about the creation of the world’s first Jewish state.
In other words, The Tickets to Paradise is a pretty good example of why the box office is where fans go to spend their money on movies, an idea that has become popular in recent years, and which is actually a good thing. There are a number of ways to look at the movie. For one, it was a hit at the box office, and was the highest grossing film of
