Men in Black III, the new installment in the series that you never knew you wanted and still aren’t sure you really needed, finally managed to usurp the box office throne from The Avengers, raking in $55 Million over the Memorial Day, which admittedly isn’t too shabby for a series we haven’t heard from over a decade.
Speaking of The Avengers, despite slowing down after nearly a month in theaters, it’s still raking in impressive holding onto some impressive numbers. The movie grossed an additional $36.8 Million over the long weekend, and it looks like it stands a good chance of overtaking The Dark Knight for total global earnings.
Battleship, the second worst movie you will ever see about pegging (that one’s a thinker), continues to sink further down into the waters of mediocrity. The movie only brought in another $10.9 Million, and it’s total gross isn’t even a quarter of the movie’s budget. Which raises one massive logical loophole: Why would you try and tie in a generic navy vs. alien movie with a board game? That would be like making a medical drama and then saying it was based off Operation, that game where you perform unlicensed surgery on screaming clowns.
Sacha Baron Cohen‘s latest movie about how people form foreign countries are hilarious because they’re different, The Dictator, earned $9.7 Million, which admittedly isn’t much, but at least it stands a chance of earning back its budget. Yay for evening out!
Finally, Chernobyl Diaries scraped together a somewhat respectable $7.9 Million, despite not being screened for critics, poor reviews, and accusations of sensationalizing the Chernobyl disaster. Honestly, when your movie receives that much flack, be thankful it earns money at all instead of hate mail.
While it didn’t come anywhere near the top 5 movies of the weekend, director Wes Anderson‘s new flick Moonrise Kingdom earned $523,000 despite only playing on four screens. To put that into perspective, that’s over $130,000 per screen, or roughly ten times the average of Men in Black III. Which proves once again that talent will always trump good marketing.
Jeremy Feist is an (ahem) entertainer from Toronto, Canada. He writes, acts, and performs on stage, and has been a writer for Popbytes for almost three years now. He lives in Toronto with his boyfriend, his incredibly dumb but cute puppy, and his immortal cat.
