Negative buzz starting flying around the internet last week concerning the box office potential of ‘Super 8’. Mid-week, Paramount predicted earnings between $25-$30 million, and claimed those low numbers were acceptable considering that ‘Super 8’ was produced on a surprisingly low budget of only $50 million. It wouldn’t take long to make its money back. Now that the totals are in, ‘Super 8’ has capped out the weekend in the #1 spot with $37 million, over $7 million above predictions.
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‘Super 8<\/strong>‘ is the second J.J. Abrams-produced monster movie to be made on a minimal budget. 2008’s ‘Cloverfield<\/a>‘ also defied studio expectations with a $40 million opening weekend in mid-January. Both ‘Super 8’ and ‘Cloverfield’ prove that the “less is more” philosophy of filmmaking works well. Many viewers have speculated that there are connections between the two films that place them in the same creature-infested universe.<\/p>\n The success of ‘Super 8’ might be attributed to the 82% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes<\/a> or the great word of mouth recommendations that have followed the Twitter-promoted sneak previews held across the country last week.<\/p>\n ‘X-Men: First Class<\/strong>‘ dropped to the #2 spot with $25 million. That’s down 55% from opening weekend, which is about typical for comic book fare during the summer.<\/p>\n ‘Judy Moody and the NOT Bummer Summer<\/strong>‘ painfully opened in the #7 spot with a soft $6.2 million. Families must have opted out of ‘Judy Moody’ for ‘Kung Fu Panda 2’, which held the #4 spot.<\/p>\n Just as it deserves, ‘The Troll Hunter<\/strong>‘ hasn’t even shown up on the weekend tracking yet.<\/p>\n Of note this week, both ‘The Hangover Part II<\/strong>‘ and ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides<\/strong>‘ crossed the $200 million mark domestically, ‘The Hangover’ being three weeks out and ‘Pirates’ four. While ‘The Hangover’ has eclipsed its $80 million budget, ‘Pirates’ is still over $40 million away from meeting its.<\/p>\n After four consecutive weeks (I promise this will be the last time you hear about it), Woody Allen’s ‘Midnight in Paris<\/strong>‘ maintained the #8 spot despite adding 797 screens to its 944-screen release. With a total gross of over $14 million, ‘Midnight in Paris’ is only $9 million away from matching the grosses of fellow Allen hits ‘Vicky Christina Barcelona<\/a>‘ and ‘Match Point’.<\/p>\n 1. ‘Super 8’ (Paramount) – $37 million<\/p>\n 2. ‘X-Men: First Class (Fox) – $25 million<\/p>\n 3. ‘The Hangover Part II’ (Warner Bros.) – $18.5 million<\/p>\n 4. ‘Kung Fu Panda 2’ (Paramount\/DreamWorks) – $16.6 million<\/p>\n 5. ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides’ (Buena Vista) – $10.8 million<\/p>\n 6. ‘Bridesmaids’ (Universal) – $10 million<\/p>\n 7. ‘Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer’ (Relativity) – $6.2 million<\/p>\n 8. ‘Midnight in Paris’ (Sony Pictures Classics) – $6.1 million<\/p>\n 9. ‘Thor’ (Paramount) – $2.3 million<\/p>\n 10. ‘Fast Five’ (Universal) – $1.7 million<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Negative buzz starting flying around the internet last week concerning the box office potential of ‘Super 8’. Mid-week, Paramount predicted earnings between $25-$30 million, and claimed those low numbers were acceptable considering that ‘Super 8’ was produced on a surprisingly low budget of only $50 million. It wouldn’t take long to make its money back….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":16683,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[743],"tags":[178,1448,3090,2284,2941,2278,247,2190,273],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16681"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16681"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":85020,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16681\/revisions\/85020"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Top 10:<\/h5>\n