Yeesh, what a crap week this has been for the box office. To give you a glimpse at how bad things were: none of the movies that premiered this weekend even cracked the top five. So instead of running down the top five, as per usual, I will go down the list and weed out the highlights.
- The Expendables took first place this weekend with, I swear this is true, $13.5 Million. Normally, that’s how much the fifth highest grossing movie makes over a weekend. This is why no one releases movies on the final weekend of August. The last weekend of August is where cinema profits go to die. Actually, I just realized this is the time of year everyone goes back to school. So if you’re reading this from class, keep it up! Maybe someday, if you’re lucky, you can earn your English degree and spend your days blogging about Hollywood in your underwear! Woo! Totally worth it!
- The Dark Knight Rises just hung onto the fifth spot this weekend, $7.1 Million and bringing its total worldwide gross up to $941 Million. Not bad for a movie that everyone on the web thinks is the biggest turd ever.
- Now for the movies that opened this weekend! First up: Premium Rush, or as I like to call it: BIKES VERSUS CARS DEATHMATCH. Actually, now that I sound it out, that’s kind of a one-sided fight, isn’t it? I mean … bikes are light-weight, have no protection to them, tip over easy … pit one of those against a car in the real world and you’re looking at one very dead biker. Either way, the movie $6.3 Million and placed seventh overall.
- At tenth place was the actually quite decent Hit and Run, whose under-performance I blame squarely on the fact that Tom Arnold is in this. Anyway, the movie made a rather paltry $4.6 Million, although there is some good news to that: since the movie was written, directed and starred in by Dax Shepard, the overhead was only $2 Million. So already, they’ve more than doubled their budget. Yay for that!
- Here’s the weird thing about The Apparition: the movie debuted in 12th place, and made only $2.9 Million in its opening, yet it was still has a higher per-screen average than eight of the top ten movies. So what happened? Blame it on the fact that it opened on only 810 screens, and there’s your answer. This is why you don’t skimp on these things!