As expected, the big game kept many moviegoers at home and out of theaters over the weekend. Estimates projected the rough patch, but even the studios didn’t foresee the blow being as heavy as it was.
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For the third week in a row, ‘American Sniper<\/strong>‘ remained in the top spot. Despite suffering its steepest decline yet (50%), the film broke yet another record. Its $31.8 million is the highest amount any movie has pulled in on a Super Bowl weekend. To date, ‘American Sniper’ has earned $248.9 million domestically and $67.3 million overseas, which is over $100 million more than director Clint Eastwood’s previous highest-grossing movie (‘Gran Torino’).<\/p>\n Three-week-old ‘Paddington<\/strong>‘ currently sits in the #2 spot with $8.5 million, but that could easily change when the weekend actuals are released. The estimates only show it separated from the #3 movie, ‘Project Almanac<\/strong>‘, by $5,000. The $12 million Found Footage ‘Almanac’ was expected to debut with $16 million, but only opened to $8 million.<\/p>\n Kevin Costner’s race relations drama ‘Black or White<\/strong>‘ opened in fourth place with $6.4 million. This isn’t a good start when you take into account that Costner personally financed more of the movie’s production budget than it drew this weekend, and that critical response has been highly negative.<\/p>\n Fifth place went to last week’s Jennifer Lopez thriller ‘The Boy Next Door<\/strong>‘. Dropping 59% in attendance, the scandalous flick grossed another $6 million, bringing this micro-budget movie’s ten-day total to $24.6 million.<\/p>\n ‘The Loft<\/strong>‘ rounded out the Top 10 with a terrible $2.8 million debut. Having opened on 1,841 screens, the $1,564 per-screen average is a hard hit for Open Road Films.<\/p>\n The IMAX release of the last two episodes of the fourth season of ‘Game of Thrones<\/strong>‘ did very well at 205 locations. The HBO series nabbed $1.5 million, for a per-screen average of $7,322. It’s safe to assume that IMAX will partner with more TV series for special events like this.<\/p>\n Weekend numbers have yet to be released for Jason Statham’s action flick ‘Wild Card’.<\/p>\n 1. ‘American Sniper’ (Warner Bros.) – $31,850,000<\/p>\n 2. ‘Paddington’ (Weinstein\/Dimension) – $8,505,000<\/p>\n 3. ‘Project Almanac’ (Paramount) – $8,500,000<\/p>\n 4. ‘Black or White’ (Relativity) – $6,456,000<\/p>\n 5. ‘The Boy Next Door’ (Universal) – $6,093,000<\/p>\n 6. ‘The Wedding Ringer’ (Screen Gems) – $5,700,000<\/p>\n 7. ‘The Imitation Game’ (Weinstein) – $5,173,000<\/p>\n 8. ‘Taken 3’ (Fox) – $3,650,000<\/p>\n 9. ‘Strange Magic’ (Buena Vista) – $3,441,000<\/p>\n 10. ‘The Loft’ (Open Road) – $2,879,000<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As expected, the big game kept many moviegoers at home and out of theaters over the weekend. Estimates projected the rough patch, but even the studios didn’t foresee the blow being as heavy as it was.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":68014,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[743],"tags":[7691,7952,178,7938,2810,7274,7951,2274,7953],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67930"}],"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=67930"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68013,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67930\/revisions\/68013"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Top 10:<\/h2>\n