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Sunday May 25, 2014

Weekend Box Office: Welcome Back, Bryan Singer; Go Away, Adam Sandler

Bryan Singer: X-Men, Days of Future Past

Singer eyes the No. 1 spot. 

I’m curious how often this happens.

The Rotten Tomatoes score of “X-Men: Days of Future Past” was 91% and it wound up grossing almost that number, $90 million, to win the weekend.

The Rotten Tomatoes score of the new Adam Sandler comedy, “Blended,” was 15% and it wound up grossing almost that, $14 million, to finish a distant third for the weekend.

Would be nice if this kind of correlation happened more often. Hollywood would strive to make better movies. But I know it’s a fluke.

Welcome back, Bryan Singer. That opening for “X-Men: Days of Future Past” is the second-best opening ever for an X-Men movie—surpassed only Brett Ratner’s abyssmal “X-Men: The Last Stand” in 2006, which grossed $102 million riding the good vibes of Bryan Singer’s previous X-Men movies. Ratner killed those vibes.  

Go away, Adam Sandler. “Blended”’s opening is among Sandler’s worst. You sort out his high-brow work (“Spanglish,” “Reign Over Me,” “Punch-Drunk Love”), and ignore his first comedies back in the mid-90s when tickets cost so much less, and it’s actually his second-lowest opener after “That’s My Boy” in 2012. “Boy” went on to gross $36 million, which is about what “Blended” will do. If it’s lucky.

Meanwhile, “Godzilla,” which roared mightily opening weekend, fell mightily this one. It grossed $31.4 million for second place, a fall-off of 66.3%. That’s the second-worst second-weekend fall-off of the year—after “About Last Night,” which fell off 70% after its Valentine’s Day debut.

And in its fourth weekend, “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” fell off by another 53% to gross $7 million. It will surely be the lowest-grossing Spider-Man movie ever:

That's unadjusted, too. It’s called franchise fatigue, Sony. Give it up. Let Spidey join the Merry Marvel Marching Society already.

Oh, right. Worldwide box office for “TAS2” is currently at $673 million. Thanks for nothing, China and Brazil.

The box office numbers

Posted at 10:58 AM on Sunday May 25, 2014 in category Movies - Box Office