Let’s get the obvious out of the way first, yes, Thor: The Dark World is #1 once again at the box office, bringing in an estimated $38.4 million over the three-day weekend, but don’t go counting on a repeat as we all know The Hunger Games: Catching Fire has next weekend in the bag by a wide margin. That said, Thor 2 is up to $146.9 million domestically after just ten days in theaters, though a 55% drop is more than our Box Office Oracle and reader aggregate predicted.
It is worth mentioning, however, Thor 2 has already surpassed the original film’s worldwide total by $30 million in just ten days, $479 million compared to $449 million for Thor back in 2011. It would seem there is some money in this Avengers franchise.
The story this weekend, however, is The Best Man Holiday, which was in more than 1,817 fewer theaters than Thor and fell only $7.9 million shy of the #1 spot with a whopping $30.5 million, $15,115 per theater average from 2,024 theaters on a $17 million budget. Scoring an “A+” CinemaScore I think you can go ahead and book that third film in the franchise and I’d say no later than 2015.
Now I know what you’re going to say, But Brad, this is no different than Think Like a Man from last year. Au contraire my faithful readers, there is one big difference. While Think Like a Man‘s $33.6 million opening was impressive, that film was rated PG-13, Best Man Holiday is a very adult R and it comes in as the seventh highest opening for an R-rated film this year, just behind Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa as five of the top seven openings this year are R-rated comedies. The other two are horrors.
It’s also interesting to look at the demographics for this film as the audience was not only 87% black, but 75% female and 63% over the age of 35. Hopefully studios are looking closely at these numbers. So often a success like this comes around and the reaction is to be “surprised” when you shouldn’t be surprised about the result, you should be surprised anyone would be surprised about the result. Yes, there are other people in this country that aren’t white teenage boys with no social lives outside of comic books and video games.
Meanwhile, Gravity became the fifth highest grossing film of the year, edging out Fast & Furious 6 as its domestic total is up to $240.5 million.
We also have what is considered to be Gravity‘s strongest Oscar competition in 12 Years a Slave, which added 267 theaters this weekend for a total of 1,411 and it added another $4.7 million to its total, which is now up to $24.9 million after a month in theaters.
Opening in limited theaters this weekend was Alexander Payne‘s latest Oscar bid in Nebraska, which brought in $140,000 from only four theaters, which is more than enough to take the per theater crown at $35,000 per. It will be interesting to see how this one performs once it expands, because I’m not expecting it to be much of a hit.
When it comes to the limited releases we included in this week’s RopeofSilicon Box Office Challenge, All is Lost appears to be a good motto for the film’s box office chances as it added 84 theaters and is now playing in 483 where it only managed to tally $935,000. Good news for those that went to see it, however, at least you won’t have to deal with unruly crowd noise, and considering it is vastly superior to Gravity, it’s a shame it isn’t catching on with audiences.
As I said in the opening, next weekend is Hunger Games: Catching Fire, which will open in approximately 4,100 theaters next weekend while Delivery Man opens in about 2,800 and the excellent Philomena begins its limited roll-out in four theaters. Anyone care to place some early predictions?
