Outside of the Mission: Impossible franchise, only War of the Worlds had a larger opening for a Tom Cruise movie than Gitesh Pandya).
There is one small blemish on this party stateside, however, which would be the B- CinemaScore the film received from opening day audiences. It’s not a terrible score, but history seems to show that anything below a B+ tends to fall just a little faster week over week. For now, with a $120 million budget things are looking just fine and I’m sure many will be rushing to declare Cruise something of a box-office star once again, or at least on the verge. I guess we won’t really find out until next March when his next sci-fi film arrives, Doug Liman‘s All You Need is Kill.
Looking over Laremy’s box office predictions from Thursday, he wasn’t too far off with a $34.2 million prediction, however he was bested in the reader predictions by Corbin who not only had the first reader prediction on the board, but the closest at $37.2m. Nice work!
In other news, last week’s #1, the Jackie Robinson biopic 42, only dropped 34% to $18 million and remaining in second place and bringing its total up to $54.1 million.
In limited release, Rob Zombie‘s The Lords of Salem scored only $622,000 from 388 theaters for a $1,752 per theater average. Considering there was virtually no marketing for the picture this doesn’t surprise me, though Zombie clearly did his best to get word out with multiple interviews around the web including spending a lot of time with us for our five-part interview series. It’s too bad there wasn’t a greater push considering it’s actually a damn good film, but after so many disappointments at the box-office I can understand why many might stay away.
Next weekend, Pain and Gain and The Big Wedding will be the primary competition for the top spot before Summer 2013 begins with Iron Man 3 kicks things off on May 3.
