La Bola Negra outsold Avengers: Endgame 3.6 to 1 in Spanish cinemas

La Bola Negra sold 613,240 tickets in Spain between Friday 25 and Sunday 27 September and took €4,673,201. Divide the money by the bodies and the average ticket cost €7.62. Every other seat sold in the country that weekend went for €7.75.

So Spain's Oscar entry, a 159-minute film about the poet Federico García Lorca, took almost half the national box office while charging less per head than the market did. The Marvel re-release immediately behind it charged €8.60.

That comparison is the story. Avengers: Endgame Encore took €1,475,258 from 171,595 admissions on 285 screens, according to the Rentrak figures published by Box Office and Kinótico. La Bola Negra beat it by 3.2 to one on money and 3.6 to one on people, with no premium-format surcharge doing any of the work.

The weekend Endgame lost, and where

Disney's re-release had a good weekend nearly everywhere else. It led the American chart with $26m from 3,060 locations, Deadline reported, and the UK and Ireland chart with £4.1m, according to Screen. How little of its 2019 self that represents we went through last week: seven per cent of the original opening.

In Spain it was not close. A Spanish-language period drama running two hours and thirty-nine minutes, directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, put more than three times as many people in seats as the biggest superhero film ever made on its victory lap. Rentrak had the whole Spanish market at €10,407,405 from 1,342,764 admissions, 98 per cent up on the previous weekend. La Bola Negra accounted for 44.9 per cent of the money and 45.7 per cent of the bodies.

Those two percentages are not the same, and the gap is the point. A film that took a smaller share of the cash than of the seats was the cheap ticket in the building. Everything else in the top ten was pulling the national average up. The Lorca film dragged it down and won.

What 414 screens actually produced

Elastica Films, which distributes in Spain, opened it on 414 screens. Screen counts 415 cinemas, the sort of discrepancy that follows a release still adding sites on the Saturday.

Per screen the film averaged €11,288 across the three days, against €5,176 for Endgame Encore on its 285. In admissions that is 1,481 people per screen, or roughly 494 a day. A 159-minute film plus trailers and turnaround occupies a slot of close to three hours, so a screen running from lunchtime to a last start at ten in the evening fits four showings. On that pattern each showing sold about 123 tickets. Spanish screens are not that large.

The running time was supposed to be the problem. It turned out to be the constraint rather than the ceiling.

The day that should not have been the biggest

The shape of the three days, as reported by Infobae and TodoAlicante: €1.31m on Friday, €1.64m on Saturday, €1.72m on Sunday. Up 25 per cent, then up another five. Sunday finished 31 per cent above Friday and was the single biggest day of the weekend. Infobae reported it was the only title in the Spanish top 20 whose takings rose on the Sunday.

That is not how a big opening behaves. Openings are front-loaded, because the audience that has been waiting turns up first. Resident Evil took nearly half of its $50m American debut on the Thursday and Friday, which we went through on 19 September. In Spain that same film was fourth this weekend with €1,107,086.

A film whose Sunday beats its Friday is being sold by the people who saw it on Friday. There is no other mechanism available.

Nobody can agree how big this is

The records claim is where the reporting falls apart. Kinótico, Infobae and the rest of the Spanish trade press, all working from the same Rentrak data, call it the ninth-biggest opening for a Spanish film in history, the fourth-biggest of any film in Spain this year, and the second-biggest Spanish opening of the past decade behind Torrente, presidente. Russpain, covering the same Rentrak weekend, calls it the fifth-biggest Spanish opening ever. Both cannot be right.

The admissions figure moves as well. Rentrak's Friday-to-Sunday count is 613,240. Infobae publishes 616,292, which takes in preview and special screenings. The gap is 3,052 tickets, and it is the difference between a weekend number and everything sold.

Elastica's own claim is the narrow one, and it is the easiest to check: the biggest opening ever for an independently distributed Spanish film, ahead of the €2.2m [REC] 2 managed for Filmax in 2009, per Screen. Screen also puts the all-time Spanish opening record at the €8.9m of The Impossible in 2012, which nothing here threatens.

What the numbers do for the campaign

The Academy's international feature committee does not read Rentrak. Distributors do, and the one that matters now is Netflix, which holds the United States and Canada.

La Bola Negra has won the best director prize at Cannes in May, shared by Calvo and Ambrossi with Paweł Pawlikowski, the audience awards at Sydney and San Sebastián, and the People's Choice Award at Toronto, the precursor that has produced 16 best picture nominees from 18 winners. Spain's film academy submitted it for best international feature on 16 September, Variety reported. Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close are in it, which will not hurt.

Festival audience prizes are voted on by people who chose to be in the building. A Sunday that beats a Friday across 414 ordinary Spanish screens is voted on by people who paid €7.62 and had no reason to be kind about a three-hour film on Lorca. The second result is the more useful one, and it is the one an American campaign can actually spend.

Netflix opens the film in cinemas in the United States and Canada on 16 October, then streams it from 2 December, a window of 47 days. Altitude has the United Kingdom and Ireland from 6 November. Spain's second weekend, the one that says whether the Sunday meant anything, starts on 2 October.