With $13.5 million and a 52% drop, The Expendables 2 can say it was #1 at the box-office for two weekends in a row, but when none of the week’s new releases manage to crack the top five it isn’t exactly saying much. The biggest surprise, however, is this is the first R-rated action film to repeat at #1 since… The Expendables.
As for those newcomers, there wasn’t even a freshman feature among the top six films with Premium Rush being the first coming in at #7 with $6.3 million from 2,255, narrowly edging out the anti-Barack Obama documentary 2016: Obama’s America, which was in less than half the theaters and managed $6.2 million.
On the reader side of things, “CJohn” was the closest on Premium Rush with a $6 million prediction while some went as high as $20 million. Arthur Carlson with a $7 million prediction on the Obama doc takes that crown.
Wrapping up the top ten is the Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard comedy Hit and Run, which Laremy thought may be able to slide into the #1 slot but it had a hard enough time securing tenth with only $4.6 million, less than half of the $10 million Laremy predicted it would do. Many of the readers went under Laremy’s prediction, but only “Gerberzy” came closest with a solid $4.2 million prediction.
The weekend’s other new release, the The Apparition failed to crack the top ten after being released in less than 900 theaters and bringing in a total of only $2.9 million. At least it has that 0% RottenTomatoes rating to hang its hat on, not many films can claim that distinction.
Some familiar, yet notable, titles in the top ten include The Dark Knight Rises, which has now reached $422.2 million domestically, making it the #11 domestic release of all-time with only $600,000 to go to top The Lion King and crack the top ten. Of course, part of the conversation this past week was how The Dark Knight Rises had sold upwards of 12 million fewer tickets compared to Tim Burton‘s 1989 Batman when adjusted for inflation. I’m not a huge fan of the apples-to-apples comparison the “adjusted for inflation” argument creates as I believe there are several factors at play, but the difference is staggering.
Also, Pixar’s Brave crossed $442 million worldwide, becoming the 11th consecutive Pixar film to cross the $400 million mark. That’s no easy feat.
The massive winner of the weekend, if per theater counts are your thing, is Mike Birbiglia’s Sleepwalk with Me, which brought in $65,000 at NY’s IFC Center, the highest per-screen debut for an American nonanimated film from a first-time filmmaker. It’s the third highest screen average of 2012 following Moonrise Kingdom and To Rome With Love. The film expands to the top 20 markets next weekend.
Another per theater winner was Oscilloscope’s breathtaking Samsara which brought in $73,792 from two theaters (one of which is the Cinerama here in Seattle) for a $36,896 per theater average. If you don’t live one of the two locations and have yet to see it, you can learn more about the film in my quasi-review right here. I loved it.
So there were some highlights from this week, but they obviously didn’t come from the wide releases. Will next week be any better?
Next week sees the release of Lawless starring Shia LaBeouf, Tom Hardy and Jessica Chastain as well as the supernatural thriller The Possession when it comes to wide releases. The Day, For a Good Time, Call… and Orlando Bloom in The Good Doctor are your limited release contenders.
I saw Lawless in Cannes (read my review here) and enjoyed it, but I get the feeling it isn’t going to blow the doors off at the box-office and I haven’t yet received a press invite to The Possession, which means Lionsgate may be trying to hide it.
The weekend’s complete top ten is listed below along with a link to compare the weekend’s numbers to Laremy’s predictions.
Shout out goes to ERCboxoffice and Gitesh Pandya for their nuggets of box-office wisdom on Twitter that helped add to this article.
SIDE NOTE: For those of you that don’t like the new box-office article layout, I apologize, but for a multitude of reasons, this is the way it had to be. I understand it is the most dramatic change to the site after the redesign and, therefore, the main reason it is getting the largest amount of derision, but I hope you can grow to accept it.
