New Lupita movie fails to impress Kenyans
Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o.
Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o is the lead character in a film released in late June but Kenyans are not too enthusiastic about it.
Data from KenyaBuzz, a leading cinema ticketing platform, shows that Kenyans have had little excitement over A Quiet Place: Day One, a horror film that was officially released on June 27 and which is currently only available in cinemas.
Between June 28 and July 8, only 130 seats had been booked via KenyaBuzz for watching the film in various cinemas across the country.
This is a far cry from the 2022 film Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, in which Lupita was one of the characters, for which moviegoers bought 4,483 seats through the ticketing platform, which translated to Sh3.78 million in ticket sales.
In contrast, A Quiet Place: Day One had sold just Sh117,175 via KenyaBuzz by July 8. Some of the cinemas where seats were bought are Century Cinemax (in Garden City, Sarit Centre and Junction); Prestige Cinemas; Westgate Cinema, Anga Diamond Plaza; among others.
One of the theories behind the lack of appetite for Lupita’s latest flick is that Kenyans are not big fans of horror films.
“They are better off with action and comics,” said a KenyaBuzz insider.
Though Lupita’s acting and that of other cast in the film has not been faulted, there is a general feeling that the first two instalments had a more engrossing story line.
A Quiet Place: Day One is the third instalment of the A Quiet Place film series. In it, Lupita plays Samira aka Sam, a terminally ill woman fighting to survive in New York when blind creatures, which are attracted to sound, any sound, land on earth from another planet, where they begin to hunt humans. The movie also stars English actor, Joseph Quinn and Djimon Hounsou.
With a rating of 6.8 out of 10 on IMdDb and an approval rate of 87 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, the film has been received quite well in other parts of the globe. According to collider.com, the film did well at the Box Office. It has amassed Sh13.3 billion in earnings in the US.
“The horror prequel grossed around $2.4 million stateside on its second Wednesday, taking its running domestic gross to just under $103 million (Sh13.3 billion),” reported the outlet.
It added that the film cost $67 million (Sh8.6 billion) to produce.
