Weekend Box Office: America Beats Brazil

Moviegoers chose outdoor activities and superheroes over this week’s new bird-brained family flick. ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’ added another $41.3 million do its domestic haul, giving it a fantastic ten-day total of $159 million. Including international numbers, the Marvel sequel has already earned $476.7 million worldwide. Think there will be a third? (I’m kidding, of course. The Marvel/Disney conglomerate already has another one in the works.)

Rio 2‘ held the top spot for Friday, but audiences wised up on Saturday and Sunday, when Captain America regained his super soldier strength to win the weekend. It’s unknown whether the day-two decline for ‘Rio’ was caused by people coming to their senses, fantastic weather across the country, bad word-of-mouth, or parents watching the trailer and realizing that the movie is an animated rip-off of ‘Meet the Parents’. Whatever the reason, on Friday, ‘Rio 2’ was on track to outgross the opening weekend for the first ‘Rio‘, but weaker Saturday and Sunday attendance lost that momentum. ‘Rio’ debuted to $39.2 million in 2011, and ‘Rio 2’ came in just below that at $39 million.

Audiences chose horror over sports, as freaky flick ‘Oculus‘ landed in the #3 spot with $12 million. That’s not a great opening, but when you take into account that the film was a festival acquisition made for just $5 million, Relativity is doing just fine with its returns.

Kevin Costner’s dry sports drama ‘Draft Day‘ debuted in fourth place. Hoping for positive word-of-mouth, Summit has incessantly hosted promotional screenings since before the Super Bowl, but that didn’t seem to do any good. From more than 2,700 locations, the feature-length NFL commercial pulled in $9.7 million.

Four-week-old ‘Divergent‘ is still plugging along. The YA adaptation finished in fifth place with $7.5 million, placing its domestic gross at $124.8 million. Summit has already announced that the final book’s adaptation will go the trendy route of being divided into two movies.

After expanding to 954 screens, ‘The Raid 2‘ didn’t perform very well. The film landed in the #11 spot with $1 million, but only earned a per-screen average of $1,063. Although that weekend draw is 25% of what ‘The Raid‘ earned during its entire domestic run, it’s still puzzling why Sony Pictures Classics decided to release this specialty foreign-language genre flick to wide release.

In limited release, David Gordon Green’s ‘Joe‘ also didn’t do too well. From 48 locations, the Nicolas Cage drama only pulled in $106,000, giving it a per-screen average of $2,208.

However, Jim Jarmusch’s vampire drama did very well. From four locations, the Tom Hiddleston/Tilda Swinton flick ‘Only Lovers Left Alive‘ earned nearly as much as ‘Joe’. Its $97,000 gave it a per-screen average of $24,250.

Top 10:

1. ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’ (Buena Vista) – $41,398,000

2. ‘Rio 2’ (Fox) – $39,000,000

3. ‘Oculus’ (Relativity) – $12,000,000

4. ‘Draft Day’ (Summit) – $9,750,000

5. ‘Divergent’ (Summit) – $7,500,000

6. ‘Noah’ (Paramount) – $7,450,000

7. ‘God’s Not Dead’ (Free Style) – $5,485,000

8. ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ (Searchlight) – $4,050,000

9. ‘Muppets Most Wanted’ (Buena Vista) – $2,193,000

10. ‘Mr. Peabody & Sherman’ (Fox) – $1,825,000

2 comments

  1. William Henley

    It’s amazing God’s Not Dead is still doing that strong. It has now earned over $40 million for a movie with a $2 million budget. Muppets Most Wanted, which opened about the same time, has made $45 million, but had a budget of $50 million. Noah has made $85 million, but had a budget of $125 million. Divergent was at least made a profit – box office totals of $124 million on a $85 million movie (so $39 million). This little Christian movie sure has made a pretty good return on investment.

    • Don’t forget Hollywood Accounting. ‘Divergent’ needs to make at least $170 million to break-even, and that’s not counting advertising and marketing. With worldwide grosses, the current box office take of ‘Divergent’ is $175,177,000 (source: Box Office Mojo). Give it a week or so to be profitable.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *