LOS ANGELES — Netflix has made a theatrical box office figure public for the first time, and it did so with a film that played in only four theaters. La Bola Negra, the Spanish-language epic from directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, averaged $69,375 per screen over its opening weekend, The Hollywood Reporter (THR) said in its Sunday weekend report, which described the release as the first time the streamer has publicly released box office returns.
That average ranks second among non-English-language releases, behind only Parasite in 2019, according to THR. It landed on the Street Fighter opening weekend, when Paramount’s adaptation won with $31 million from 3,575 North American theaters and the weekend’s domestic total stood at an estimated $101.6 million, per Rentrak.
The disclosure matters as much as the number. THR reported in September that Netflix planned to publish the film’s receipts, something the trade said the company had never done for any other release. The figure itself rests on a small base. You Can See Everything, the A24 documentary, averaged $17,544 across 855 theaters, according to THR, so the two averages describe very different rollouts. Multiplied across four screens, $69,375 implies a gross near $277,500, TEH’s own arithmetic; THR printed no total.
Netflix said on its Tudum site on Oct. 15 that the film would open in New York and Los Angeles on Oct. 16 and reach Netflix on Dec. 2 in the U.S. and Canada. Its rollout page names the first-day screens as the Angelika Film Center and the Paris Theater in New York and AMC Century City and AMC Burbank 16 in Los Angeles. That makes four, which squares with the count in THR’s weekend report.
The film is Spain’s official submission for the International Feature Oscar, Netflix says, and won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, which the company describes as the first top prize for a Netflix title. THR’s September report gave the theatrical window as 47 days, the longest in Netflix’s history, and said the film was beginning to look like a primary challenger to The Odyssey in the best picture race. THR critic Richard Lawson called it “vivid and transporting.”
What the figures do not show is longer than what they do. THR’s report does not say who tallied the numbers or whether they are independently tracked, and the Tudum post announcing the opening does not mention box office at all. Netflix’s rollout page lists openings in Boston and Dallas on Oct. 30 and in many more cities on Nov. 6, so the next average will be spread across far more than four screens. Whether it holds, and whether Netflix keeps publishing it, is not yet known.
