PostTrak shows that 78% of the audience said Pan was excellent or very good. It would be nice if these were promising signs for Pan in the long run; instead, it carries a 22% Rotten Tomatoes score. If reviews had been better for Pan, that might have helped drive business, given Wright’s Oscar-ish resume at the arthouse.
Rentrak’s PostTrak reports that largely older females are turning up for the film respectively at 57% and 58% over 25. However, this appears to be the Hugh Jackman fan club outnumbering moms at the cinema, since only 3% of the audience was under 12.
Warner Bros. has turned its marketing machine on full blast for Pan from set pieces and stunts around the globe to Rooney Mara (Tiger Lily) and Levi Miller working down to the wire with appearances on the Today show Friday morning. However, the press has been shooting flaming arrows at Pan for quite some time.
They completely lost it when Mara beat out Lupita Nyong’o and Adèle Exarchopoulos for the role of Tiger Lily, whom Barrie conceived as Native American. Petitions swarmed the Warner lot calling for the studio to stop casting white actors in non-white roles.
(Wright defended the casting decision, claiming that Barrie never identified Tiger Lily’s nationality in the source material and that it was more appropriate to portray Neverland’s denizens in the film as a group of multi-cultural indigenous folks.)