Weekend Box Office: Gluttons for Punishment

Masochists flooded theaters this weekend to publicly flagellate themselves by paying to see the should-be direct-to-video ‘300’ sequel, while DreamWorks Animation’s lasted irrelevant family flick underperformed.

Moviegoers across North America aren’t the only suckers who fell for ‘300: Rise of an Empire‘. The movie pulled in $45 million domestically (more than half of the record-setting first film) and another $87.8 million internationally. It’s a good thing that the decision-makers at Warner Bros. decided to push the release date out and convert the movie to 3D, because 63% of the people duped into seeing it paid the extra price for 3D tickets. Dammit, now we’ll probably have to sit through another ‘300’ sequel.

DreamWorks’ revival of the 50-year-old cartoon ‘Mr. Peabody & Sherman‘ played better than some of the studio’s recent outings, but it still didn’t do that great. From nearly 4,000 locations, the computer-animated movie only pulled in $32.5 million. As I suspected, the character was only relevant to older audiences. More than 50% of those who attended ‘Mr. Peabody’ were above the age of 25.

Non-Stop‘ fell from first to third place with a 46% drop. Its second weekend resulted in another $15.3 million, which brings its ten-day total up to $52.1 million. ‘The Lego Movie‘ suffered its worst week-to-week decline, falling 47% with $11 million. To date, ‘Lego’ has earned $224.9 million domestically.

Fifth place went to week-old ‘Son of God‘, which suffered a massive 61% decline in attendance yet grossed another $10 million. After ten days, the edited-down version of last year’s cable TV miniseries has earned $41.4 million.

Playing on just four screens, Wes Anderson’s ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel‘ is off to a fantastic start. Its $800,000 weekend resulted in a $200,000 per-screen average, which is the ninth-highest of all time. Fox Searchlight will expand the release over the next few weeks, so hang tight and it will be in your local theaters soon.

Also of note, Best Picture winner ‘12 Years a Slave‘ returned to the box office Top 10 even though the film is already available on Blu-ray.

The opening weekend numbers for ‘Grand Piano‘ have yet to be released.

Top 10:

1. ‘300: Rise of an Empire’ (Warner Bros.) – $45,050,000

2. ‘Mr. Peabody & Sherman’ (Fox) – $32,500,000

3. ‘Non-Stop’ (Universal) – $15,378,000

4. ‘The Lego Movie’ (Warner Bros.) – $11,005,000

5. ‘Son of God’ (Fox) – $10,000,000

6. ‘The Monuments Men’ (Sony) – $3,100,000

7. ‘3 Days to Kill’ (Relativity) – $3,062,000

8. ‘Frozen’ (Buena Vista) – $3,010,000

9. ’12 Years a Slave’ (Fox Searchlight) – $2,175,000

10. ‘Ride Along’ (Universal) – $2,004,000

1 comment

  1. William Henley

    According to Box Office Mojo, the difference between The Lego Movie and Son of God was only about $550k this past weekend. Has the movie not opened internationally yet?

    Its interesting that two of the movies in the top 10 are either already on Blu-Ray or come out in the next week.

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