Those of you who follow our weekly Box Office Report may have noticed that we skipped our report last week. It wasn’t for any other reason than it was the saddest and weakest week that the US box office brought in all year. It was pretty depressing.
We figured, given the fact that two blockbusters (one with a soft opening of 425 theaters) and a kids’ threequal was hitting theaters, there was bound to be a boom in ticket sales. Or so we thought.
This weekend, the big hit (and that’s speaking wildly) was Warner Bros’ Sherlock Holmes 2, which netted only $40 Million. That’s about $20 Million less than the first film brought in on its first weekend.
The margin after that first film was also pretty massive, as Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked pulled in a whole third of their production budget with a total of $23 Million for the weekend. This was the lowest of the three films’ opening weekends, which was about half of both films’ respective opening totals.
Finally, coming in third this weekend, actually beat out expectations for the theater averages, was the extremely soft opening of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, which only opened in 425 screens across the country. The film netted $13 million, which was an average of $30,000 per screen. Let’s hope that the film continues this trend on Wednesday as it opens in 3,400 screens.
Also hitting theaters next weekend is Adventures of Tin Tin in 3,000 screens and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in 2,800 screens.
