Box Office Report: ‘John Carter’ Lands with a Thud, While ‘The Lorax’ Continues To Bring in The Green

That unfortunate loud thudding noise you just heard was John Carter‘s opening weekend. The mega budget, would be franchise starter came in at a beyond disappointing 30.6 million. Good enough for second place to last week’s winner, The Lorax.

Speaking of this week’s box office champion, The Lorax hauled in an impressive 39.1 million, representing a mild 44% drop from last week’s huge opening numbers. With a massive opening, and a mild drop, the Dr. Suess adaptation is in prime shape to be the break out hit of the spring. It really only has The Hungar Game to compete with, and that audience is similar but far from exact.

Project X held well, and preformed strongly in the wake of a solid opening weekend. This week it was announced that a sequel to the found footage party film was possibly underway, and a continued strong presence at the box office goes a long way in validating that decision.

While the disappointment of John Carter is in the budget spent to money earned ratio, one other new film was a failure in nearly every quantifiable category. A Thousand Words is a family friendly Eddie Murphy vehicle that fail to rally much enthusiasm with the critics, and even less with the movie going public. It’s sixth place showing is unfortunately all to common among recent Eddie Murphy projects, and might be a contributing factor to his pseudo retirement.

Next week sees the release of 21 Jump Street, which is currently sitting at a very impressive 96% positive on Rotten Tomatoes. Of course critic aggregate sites are not a be all end all indicator of a film’s box office success, but the early positivity seems to be indicative of the crowd reactions as well. In the wake of a poor John Carter open, 21 Jump Street might be able to swoop in and make enough of a pre-Hunger Games splash to register the film as a hit.

1 Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax $39,100,000
2 John Carter $30,603,000
3 Project X $11,550,000
4 Silent House $7,010,000
5 Act of Valor $7,000,000
6 A Thousand Words $6,350,000
7 Safe House $5,000,000
8 The Vow $4,000,000
9 This Means War $3,750,000
10 Journey 2: The Mysterious Island $3,685,000