Tomorrowland didn’t impress too many critics and opening day audiences weren’t all that enamored either as it scored a “B” CinemaScore, but it did manage to pull in enough movie goers to secure the #1 spot this weekend with $32.2 million. Budgeted at $190 million this one is going to need some big help from overseas audiences (where it brought in $26.7 million this weekend) as it seems the domestic crowd, rightly, has better things to do.
One interesting fact about this Memorial Day weekend as Box Offuce guru Gitesh Pandya points out on Twitter, the last time not a single film hit $40 million from Friday thru Sunday of Memorial Day weekend was 1995. Yes, twenty years ago when Casper opened #1 at $22 million and Die Hard: With a Vengeance only brought in $19 million in its second weekend. Yowsers. The weekend itself is down around 18% vs. last year when X-Men: Day of Future Past opened with $90.8 million.
Fox’s Poltergeist remake wasn’t able to generate too many positive reviews and finished the weekend in fourth place with $23 million and a very weak “C+” CinemaScore, which is to say you can expect this one to drop off the map pretty quick. But given it only has a $35 million budget the studio should walk away rather unscathed.
Once we begin looking at last weekend’s new releases, Pitch Perfect 2 dropped 56%, which might sound bad, but when a movie opens near $70 million and the majority of expectations were nowhere near that opening, a large second weekend drop isn’t too crazy. So, with $30.3 million this weekend domestically and another $15.2 million overseas and you have a movie budgeted at $29 million scoring $187 million globally in just ten days. Impressive.
Next is Mad Max: Fury Road, which dipped only 47% for a $23.8 million second weekend, which is a solid result and something fans of the film should be excited about as its cume now rises to $87.3 million domestically. This was always going to be a tough sell given it looks nothing like the glossy superhero movies summer movie audiences have come to expect and a 47% drop shows it may have some decent legs, which is not only encouraging for Fury Road, but good news for the future of non-superhero blockbuster cinema in the future.
Next weekend has The Rock fighting an earthquake in San Andreas along with Cameron Crowe‘s Aloha. I’m really curious to see how San Andreas ends up doing because I seem to have this belief that The Rock is something of a box office draw… is he?
