Weekend Box Office: A ‘Warm’ Super Bowl Weekend

While the Super Bowl always marks a huge money-making weekend for television, it typically signifies a soft weekend in theaters. However, the box office actually held up pretty well this year.

With a thriving debut, the new romantic zombedy ‘Warm Bodies‘ topped this weekend’s charts. Only expected to bring in $17.7 million, this part zombie / part romantic comedy landed at $19.5 million. That’s quite impressive considering that its cast is composed of relatively unknown young actors (minus the cameo-ish role from John Malkovich).

Second place went to another another genre film that doesn’t take itself too seriously. ‘Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters’ didn’t have the best second-weekend holdover (it fell 53%), but it also performed better than expected. Making a half million more than predicted, the movie closed out the weekend with $9.2 million. The week-old $50 million 3D flick has earned $34.4 million in its first 10 days.

Oscar hopeful ‘Silver Linings Playbook‘ continues to kill at the box office. The 12-week-old $21 million atypical romantic comedy has now grossed $80.3 million. This weekend, it fell only 14% in attendance and climbed from fourth place to third. ‘Mama‘ slipped from second to fourth, but has proven to be a great investment for Universal, as it was made on a $15 million budget and has now grossed $58.2 million. ‘Zero Dark Thirty‘ rounded out the Top 5 with $5.3 million. The $40 million Osama bin Laden manhunt movie has a cumulative total of $77 million.

The new Sylvester Stallone action movie ‘Bullet to the Head‘ failed to crack the Top 5. With a $4.5 million opening weekend, it only managed to land in sixth place. With Arnold Schwarzenegger’s January flop ‘The Last Stand’ and Jason Statham’s week-old ‘Parker’ also tanking, ‘Bullet to the Head’ marks the third disastrous run for an aging action star this year. You can easily clump ‘Stand Up Guys‘ into this group. Starring Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin, Lionsgate’s geriatric gangster comedy opened to a measly $1.5 million. (Mind you, it only appeared on 659 screens.) Here’s hoping that Valentine’s Day’s ‘A Good Day to Die Hard’ doesn’t further this trend.

The only other limited release to have its numbers announced thus far is ‘Sound City‘, Dave Grohl’s Sundance documentary about the iconic recording studio that recently closed its doors. On 16 screens, the film earned $70,000, for a per-screen average of $4,375.

Top 10:

1. ‘Warm Bodies’ (Summit) – $19,505,000

2. ‘Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters’ (Paramount) – $9,210,000

3. ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ (Weinstein) – $8,113,000

4. ‘Mama’ (Universal) – $6,730,000

5. ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ (Sony) – $5,300,000

6. ‘Bullet to the Head’ (Warner Bros.) – $4,500,000

7. ‘Parker’ (FilmDistrict) -$3,215,000

8. ‘Django Unchained’ (Weinstein) – $3,039,000

9. ‘Les Miserables’ (Universal) – $2,439,000

10. ‘Lincoln’ (Buena Vista) – $2,412,000

3 comments

  1. EM

    This weekend I felt a little like Aaron and the rest of you film festivalgoers. I ended up attending four screenings on Saturday, plus a fifth on Sunday—just a little taste of Sundance or Cannes, I’m sure. Warm Bodies was the only film I saw in a first-run theater. I also saw the film noir Out of the Past (1948), a presentation of the five current nominees for the Oscar for Best Live-Action Short, the 2012 film Holy Motors, and the Humphrey Bogart vehicle In a Lonely Place (1950). My butt is recovering nicely, thank you.

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