I don’t mind admitting I’m a bit shocked at the $54 million for Dreamworks Animation’s Home. Dreamworks Animation hasn’t had a non-sequel perform this well since 2009’s Monsters vs. Aliens and this is even better than the $49.4 million opening for last year’s How to Train Your Dragon 2, which went on to make $618.9 million worldwide. Seems families were primed and ready for a new movie to take the kids to and this fit the bill and with an “A” CinemaScore it would seem they walked away impressed. The pic does carry a hefty $135 budget, but if these numbers are any indication that won’t be too hard to overcome. Good news for Dreamworks.
Then we come to Get Hard and it seems audiences can’t get enough Kevin Hart and you cast him alongside Will Ferrell and you have box office magic to the tune of $34.6 million, which is still second to the $41.6 million Ride Along took in as Hart’s largest result for a leading performance, but that film’s PG-13 rating definitely helped in that respect compared to the R-rated Get Hard. For Ferrell, this is right around The Other Guys opening numbers ($35.5 million), and in terms of his live action features, it ranks third with the $47 million for 2006’s Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby still the peak for Ferrell.
With a “B” CinemaScore, audiences weren’t quite as enamored with Get Hard as they were with Home, but that seems to match the mixed reviews that declared the pic crassly homophobic. I personally skipped it, but Mike enjoyed it well enough.
Coming in third was Insurgent, dropping 58% from its position as last weekend’s #1 with $22 million. That’s a larger second weekend drop than Divergent as the sequel just can’t hang with its predecessor. The worldwide total is now up to $180 million after just two weekends, which is $108 million shy of Divergent, but I don’t have comparative numbers to know if it’s in a better or worse position than it was last year at the same time.
Expanding into 1,218 theaters we have one of our first independent successes of the year in the form of the excellent horror It Follows, which generated $4 million with a marketing campaign lead largely by social media and digital. I’m not sure I saw a single television ad for this one now that I think of it, but I loved seeing it advertised all over this site as I am fully onboard with this bad boy, read my review here.
As far as what’s in the future, look for Home to continue its success with nothing animated in sight until Pixar’s Inside Out in June (I’m not counting Underdogs), but look for huge numbers this coming weekend with the arrival of Furious 7. Just how high will that one go? Early predictions about a month ago were saying around $110 million, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s much higher. You?
