Most comedians would be thrilled to sell out an arena. Kevin Hart turned his into a movie and took on the summer blockbusters. Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain, built around the stand-up tour that brought him to Madison Square Garden in 2012, opened in US cinemas on Wednesday, July 3, 2013. Lionsgate released it through its Summit and Codeblack labels, and Leslie Small and Tim Story directed.
It was not a wide release in the usual sense. The film opened on 876 screens, the same holiday week that Despicable Me 2 and The Lone Ranger arrived on thousands. Even so, it took about $17.4 million over the five-day Independence Day stretch, including roughly $10 million over the Friday-to-Sunday weekend. Box Office Mojo noted that this had already doubled the total for Hart’s previous concert film, Laugh at My Pain (2011), and that after only five days it was the fifth-highest-grossing stand-up comedy film ever. Opening-night audiences gave it an “A” CinemaScore.
When its run ended, the film had grossed about $32.2 million in North America on a reported production budget of $2.5 million, according to The Numbers. Not every critic loved it: several reviewers felt the backstage and documentary material took time away from the stand-up. Audiences turned up anyway, and that told the studios what they needed to know.
The timing mattered. Hart had Ride Along and the About Last Night remake on the way, and his ability to sell tickets to his own stand-up was now a matter of record, not industry talk.
Our take
Let Me Explain was the moment Kevin Hart stopped being a promising comic with a loyal following and became a bankable movie star. A stand-up film beating the odds against holiday tentpoles showed that Black comedy audiences were being badly underserved by Hollywood. It also set up the run of hits that followed. The documentary padding hasn’t aged especially well, but the business case it made is still being followed.
Sources: Box Office Mojo, The Numbers, TheWrap
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