{"id":56380,"date":"2013-09-23T08:00:52","date_gmt":"2013-09-23T15:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/?p=56380"},"modified":"2017-09-01T09:39:02","modified_gmt":"2017-09-01T16:39:02","slug":"boxoffice-sept-23-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/boxoffice-sept-23-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"Weekend Box Office: Going Dark…"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Editor’s Note: Luke is out this week. Filling in with the box office update is our new contributor Jack Lilburn. Please give him a warm welcome. \u2013JZ] <\/em>
\n<\/p>\n

Leading the box office this weekend was a dark crime thriller, which also conveniently kicks off the season of Oscar contenders.<\/p>\n

Thanks in part to strong reviews, festival buzz and ubiquitous TV appearances by stars Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal, the kidnapping drama ‘Prisoners<\/strong>‘ grossed a healthy $21.4 million to take first place. The film, directed by Quebecois Denis Villeneuve (Foreign Language Oscar nominee for ‘Incendies’), features a rare non-action, non-musical performance by Jackman, and further cements his status as an actor who can open a picture. Good word-of-mouth should propel the movie somewhere between $70 to $80 million, though one can only speculate if the original casting choices of Leonardo DiCaprio and Christian Bale would have yielded even greater numbers. <\/p>\n

After a spectacular debut last week, the microbudget horror flick ‘Insidious: Chapter 2<\/strong>‘ suffered a dramatic if not unexpected 64% drop-off, grossing $14.5 million. In only ten days of release, the James Wan sequel has already earned twelve times its $5 million production budget. This makes the Film District title one of the most lucrative releases of the year, though it won’t come anywhere near the $136 million gross of Wan’s earlier horror smash ‘The Conjuring’. <\/p>\n

Coming in third, Luc Besson’s ‘The Family<\/strong>‘ dropped nearly 50% from its opening weekend, yielding a modest $7 million dollars. Skewing for an older audience, the mob comedy should recoup its $30 million dollar production budget within the next week.<\/p>\n

In surprising news, despite only adding 45 theatres, the Spanish-language family comedy ‘Instructions Not Included<\/strong>‘ actually increased its box office yield from last weekend by 17% with another $5.7 million dollars. The sleeper hit is already the fifth highest-grossing foreign language film in box office history.<\/p>\n

In fifth place, the dance picture ‘Battle of the Year<\/strong>‘ managed to gross only $5 million. Star and convicted domestic abuser Chris Brown, plus a 6% Rotten Tomatoes<\/em> score<\/a>, did the movie no favors. <\/p>\n

In retro news, the 1939 masterpiece ‘The Wizard of Oz<\/strong>‘ hit 300+ IMAX screens this weekend and grossed just north of $3 million. That’s nearly double the earnings of last year’s ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ IMAX re-release. <\/p>\n

Top 10:<\/h5>\n

1. ‘Prisoners\u2032 (Warner Bros) \u2013 $21,430,000<\/p>\n

2. ‘Insidious: Chapter 2\u2032 (Film District) \u2013 $14,500,000<\/p>\n

3. ‘The Family\u2032 (Relativity) \u2013 $7,000,000<\/p>\n

4. ‘Instructions Not Included’ (Lionsgate) \u2013 $5,700,000<\/p>\n

5. ‘Battle of the Year’ (Screen Gems) \u2013 $5,000,000<\/p>\n

6. ‘We’re the Millers’ (Warner Bros.) \u2013 $4,670,000<\/p>\n

7. ‘Lee Daniels’ The Butler’ (Weinstein) \u2013 $4,304,000<\/p>\n

8. ‘Riddick’ (Universal) \u2013 $3,672,000<\/p>\n

9. ‘The Wizard of Oz 3D\/IMAX (Warner Bros.) \u2013 $3,022,000<\/p>\n

10. ‘Planes’ (Buena Vista) \u2013 $2,861,000<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Editor’s Note: Luke is out this week. Filling in with the box office update is our new contributor Jack Lilburn. Please give him a warm welcome. \u2013JZ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":56382,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[743],"tags":[6795,178,2516,6744,6466,2504,6762,384],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56380"}],"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\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56380"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56574,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56380\/revisions\/56574"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}