The opening day audience didn’t seem to love it, giving it a “B-” CinemaScore, but with $38 million Dumb and Dumber To is the #1 film at this weekend’s box office, though not by much.
Disney’s Big Hero 6 dropped only 35%, bringing in $36 million as the first of last weekend’s two newcomers to continue very strong in their second weekend as Disney passed the $4 billion mark at the global box office this weekend. This is the biggest second weekend for a non-Pixar, animated Disney feature ever. That is, as long as we’re not adjusting for inflation.
Christopher Nolan‘s Interstellar shared second weekend success with Disney, dropping only 39% for a sophomore session of $29.1 million, bringing the film’s cume to $97.8 million. This one will be crossing $100 million by early next week and it seems audiences are caught up in the ride and not so much the nit-picking of the film’s science. I guess there are fewer astrophysicists in the movie-going public than there are in the critical community.
The other new wide release this weekend was Beyond the Lights, which didn’t exactly have a stellar opening, but then again this one sort of hit theaters extremely under the radar. How under the radar? Well, I didn’t even know it was being released until Wednesday evening. Starring a pair of up-and-coming actors, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Nate Parker, the film brought in $6.5 million to go along with an “A” CinemaScore.
It’s also nice to see Birdman finally crack the top ten as it has now expanded to 857 theaters. This weekend it added another $2.4 million to its total, bringing its domestic cume to $11.5 million.
Playing in 371 theaters, Jon Stewart‘s Rosewater brought in $1.2 million, which isn’t exactly crushing it, though I’m not sure anyone really expected this one to blow the roof off at the box office.
In limited release, Foxcatcher jumped out to a massive start, bringing in $288,000 from only six theaters for a $48,000 per theater average. Meanwhile, The Theory of Everything is still in limited release, playing in 41 theaters, where it brought in $738,000 for a per theater average of $18,000, bringing its cume to just over $1 million after a couple of weekends.
Next weekend sees the release of the movie that will most likely be the first of two major competitors to Transformers: Age of Extinction for worldwide box office supremacy. Will The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 end its box office run with more than $1.087 billion? Catching Fire finished with $864.5 million, which means this one is going to need a big boost, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it happen. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire opened with $158 million last year, care to post any early estimates on how Mockingjay will do a year later?
