Weekend Box Office: You Got Purged

While there weren’t any big surprises in the Top 10 rankings this weekend, the box office’s cumulative totals were surprisingly high – especially for the weekend’s micro-budget winner.

From the start, ‘The Purge‘ was expected to finish in the #1 spot. What wasn’t expected was the high dollar volume that it would bring. On 2,536 screens, the film pulled in $36.3 million, earning an impressive per-screen average of $14,345. When you consider that the movie was made on a tiny $3 million budget, you can see that its returns are already huge.

The execs at Universal must be doubly pleased by this, because they also nabbed the #2 spot with three-week-old ‘Fast & Furious 6‘. Its $19.7 million weekend pushed the franchise’s sixth installment beyond the $200 million threshold domestically. With a $202 million nationwide cumulative total and another solid weekend overseas, ‘Furious 6’ has now made $584.6 million worldwide.

Summit’s ‘Now You See Me‘ had a strong holdover from last weekend. The magical $75 million heist movie only slipped 33% in attendance and earned another $19.5 million. Its domestic ten-day total has carried the film up to $61.3 million.

The R-rated ‘Wedding Crashers‘ may have opened to $33.9 million back in 2005, but the latest Owen Wilson/Vince Vaughn comedy couldn’t come close – not even with a PG-13 rating – to matching that success. On 3,366 screens, the heavy-on-Google, light-on-laughs ‘The Internship‘ rambled along, only earning $18.1 million.

Maintaining its fifth-place position was Fox’s animated family flick ‘Epic‘. The $12.1 million weekend has pushed its 17-day total up to $84.1 million.

It’s worth noting that last week’s flop ‘After Earth‘ is still continuing to disappoint. Its third-place opening was followed by a lousy $11.2 million seventh-place second weekend. After ten days, the $130 million budgeted film has only wrangled $46.5 million.

Also of note: ‘Star Trek into Darkness‘ crossed the $200 million mark, ‘The Hangover Part III‘ hit $100 million, and ‘Iron Man 3‘ should pass $400 million over the next week.

As for the indie releases, Joss Whedon’s black & white adaptation of Shakespeare’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing‘ was the only one to debut with great numbers. Showing on just five screens, ‘Much Ado’ brought in $183,000 and earned a per-screen average of $36,600. The other two noteworthy limited releases earned much less. Joel Edgerton and Teresa Palmer’s ‘Wish You Were Here‘ only pulled in $25,700 on 11 screens, and ‘Violet & Daisy‘ earned $10,300 on 17 screens. The per-screen averages for those were $2,336 and $606, respectively.

Top 10:

1. ‘The Purge’ (Universal) – $36,379,000

2. ‘Fast & Furious 6’ (Universal) – $19,760,000

3. ‘Now You See Me’ (Summit) – $19,500,000

4. ‘The Internship’ (Fox) – $18,100,000

5. ‘Epic’ (Fox) – $12,100,000

6. ‘Star Trek into Darkness’ (Paramount) – $11,700,000

7. ‘After Earth’ (Sony) – $11,200,000

8. ‘The Hangover Part III’ (Warner Bros.) – $7,380,000

9. ‘Iron Man 3’ (Buena Vista) – $5,787,000

10. ‘The Great Gatsby’ (Warner Bros.) – $4,230,000

1 comment

  1. A good weekend for Universal, indeed. I’m sure there are some sighs of relief, because they have some terrible weeks/months/years past them with very few genuine hits. I don’t know for sure, but I think they’re currently number 6 on the rundown of all major American studios.

    I’m still wondering how ‘Before Midnight’ is doing.

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