 |
| Weekend Box Office: 'Insidious 2' Scores $41m, 'The Butler' Crosses $100m |
The film is the second-biggest September debut of all-time, behind the $42.5m debut of Sony SNE +0.09%‘s Hotel Transylvania last year, although that record may fall again when Sony’s Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 2 opens in two weekends. It’s easily the top live-action debut in September and the third-biggest debut for a pure supernatural horror film behind Paranormal Activity 3 ($52m) and the $41.8m debut of The Conjuring from July. Wow, the director of The Conjuring must be very relieved right now…
Jokes aside, director James Wan just became the second director to have two $40 million+ debuts in a single year (the Wachowski siblings of course had the two Matrix sequels ten years ago who debuted with $91m and $48m respectively over their Fri-Sun openings. Heck, when Fast & Furious 7 (or whatever it’s eventually called) opens on July 11th, Mr. Wan will presumably become the first director to have three $40m+ debuts in a year’s time. For distributor Film District, not only is this their biggest opening weekend, crushing the $30m debut of Olympus Has Fallen, but it came within $3m of being their third biggest total grosser and will surpass the $44m total of the 2012 Red Dawn remake on Monday. After that, it’s the $54m total of the first Insidious and the $98.9m total of Olympus Has Fallen.
If Insidious Chapter 2 were any genre other than horror, I’d say that the film would surely top $100 million and become FilmDistrict’s biggest earner. The original Insidious opened with $13m and had insane legs, grossing 4x its opening weekend and surpassing the more high-profile Scream 4 ($38m) during the spring 2011 season. One shouldn’t expect the same legs for Insidious Chapter 2, if only because it’s a sequel. But even a terrible 2.0x multiplier gives the film $82m. Heck, even if it plays like The Purge or The Devil Inside (over/under 1.5x its debut), it still gets to $62m. We’ll know next weekend what the legs on this thing will be, although with zero horror for a month until the October 18th debut of Carrie (and no Paranormal Activity this season with the Spanish spin-off set for January, 2014), Insidious Chapter 2 is the only game in town for much of the Halloween season.
The only other wide opener was Relativity’s The Family. The Luc Besson-helmed crime comedy earned $14.5 million, which is neither very good or very bad. It’s the second best debut of Luc Besson’s career as a director behind the $17m debut of The Fifth Element. The Robert Di Niro/Michelle Pheiffer/Tommy Lee Jones/Dianna Agron mob comedy cost just $30m to make, so even if it collapses domestically it should crawl to $35-40m. Eurocorp and Relativity split costs with Eurocorp handling foreign distribution, meaning their exposure is limited and the latter may well score overseas, Luc Besson-produced action films tend to make at least as much over there as they do over here and in some cases (Transporter 3) noticeably more. There really isn’t that much to say about this one. But readers would do well to remember that we’re in the fall season, which means two months of smaller movies that are cheap enough to not need blockbuster openings to be hits. That’s supposed to be a good thing,so let’s treat it as such rather than screaming “fail!” when every little movie doesn’t open to $40m.
In holdover news, Lee Daniels’ The Butler has crossed $100 million as of today, ending its fifth weekend with $100.3m. The Weinstein Company release earned another $5.58m, down just 33% from last weekend. The Forest Whitaker/Oprah Winfrey Civil Rights drama should finish out with about $115m domestic, with the caveat that it may well end up reissued down the road if it scores during the awards season. Universal’s Riddick proved a one-weekend-wonder, dropping 63% in weekend two. The Vin Diesel sci-fi sequel earned $7 million for a ten-day cume of $31.3m. This one was purely for the fans, and fortunately it was cheap enough that it only needed to preach to the converted. No harm, no foul.
Warner Bros.’ We’re the Millers dropped just 30% in its sixth weekend, earning another $5.6m and bringing its domestic cume to $131m. One Direction: This Is Us released a 20 minute-longer “fan cut” this weekend, which may have stemmed the bleeding. The concert doc earned $2.4m, or down 45%, for a $27m cume, putting it over the $25.3m total of Katy Perry: Part of Me. Lionsgate and Pantelion’s Instructions Not Included continued to kick demo-butt, grossing $4.25 million (-48%) on 932 screens. That brings the Spanish-language comedy up to $26.5m, making it the sixth-biggest foreign language grosser in American box office history. Getaway lost 1/3 of its screens in weekend three and dropped 69%, grossing $678,000 on 1,378 screens, bringing its cume just under $10m.
Monsters University has now grossed $730 million worldwide while Planes has $138m worldwide. The former will surpass the $731m worldwide gross of Up in a day or two to become Pixar’s third-biggest global grosser. Despicable Me 2 has now earned $359m domestic and $840m worldwide while Fast & Furious 6 has $788m worldwide, R.I.P.D. now has $67.9m worldwide, and Kick-Ass 2 has $57.9m global. Pain And Gain has $78.9m while World War Z has $538.2m and Star Trek Into Darkness has $466.3m global. Finally, after a successful reissue last weekend, Sony’s This Is the End has crossed $100m domestic. Mission accomplished. And the other ‘end of the world movie, The World’s End, has $40m worldwide.
That’s it for this weekend. Join us for the debut of Warner Bros.’ kidnapped child drama Prisoners and Sony’s street dancing drama Battle of the Year, as well as the limited debut of Ron Howard’s Chris Hemsworth Formula-1 racing drama Rush. Also of note, Warner Bros. is reissuing The Wizard of Oz in IMAX 3D on 300 IMAX screens.
