Recent Reviews
The Cagneys
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
Something to Sing About (1937)
Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
A Lion Is In the Streets (1953)
Man of a Thousand Faces (1957)
Never Steal Anything Small (1959)
Shake Hands With the Devil (1959)
Sunday March 20, 2016
Box Office: Dystopian Times for Dystopian Movies?
Is it dystopian times for our teenaged dystopian movies? Meaning a utopia for critics?
“The Hunger Games” ended last fall with a whimper, grossing 68% of what the first one did, while “The Maze Runner” never really caught on ($80-$100 mil). As for “The Divergent Series”? It had hopes to be another “Hunger Games” but now it's cratering toward “Maze.”
This weekend, “Divergent: Allegiant” opened at $29 million, which is almost half of what the original opened to in 2014:
YEAR | MOVIE | US GROSS | OPENING |
2014 | Divergent | $150,947,895 | $54,607,747 |
2015 | The Divergent Series: Insurgent | $130,179,072 | $52,263,680 |
2016 | The Divergent Series: Allegiant | $29,050,000 | $29,050,000 |
The original wound up grossing 2.75 x its opening, the sequel 2.5 times. If this one does that, that's only $72.5 million, or half of what the original grossed. If it does 3 x its opening, it'll still be around $87. And there's one more sequel to go. Jane, stop this crazy thing.
“Divergent”'s loss is “Zootopia”'s gain. For the third weekend in a row, it took top prize, with $38 mil, bringing its total thus far to $201. Abroad, it's added another $389.
In third place? One of those springtime (read: Easterish) Christian movies, “Miracles from Heaven,” starring a former star (Jennifer Garner). Trailer here. I hadn't heard of it until this week, but then I'm not in its demographic. Key words from the trailer: “faith” and “From the producers of 'Heaven Is For Real.'” On the one hand, it didn't open great: $15 mil. On the other hand, that's the 7th-best opening for quote-unquote “Christian” movies, meaning cultre-war Christian movies. And if you remove the big boys (“Passion” and the “Narnia” series), it's actually third, behind only “Son of God” ($25) and “Heaven Is For Real” ($22).
What's dying on the vine? “10 Cloverfield Lane” (12.5/45), “London Has Fallen” (6.8/50), “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” (2.8/19), and “The Brothers Grimsby” (1.4/5.9) What's holding on? “Deadpool,” the year's biggest hit so far. In its sixth weekend it grossed another $8 mil for $341 domestic and $389 overseas.
Anomaly of the weekend: “The Bronze,” opening in 1,167 theaters, had one of the worst per-theater-average openings ever: $361 per. To be precise, it's the seventh-worst ever for movies opening in more than 1,000 theaters.