You know you have had a bad opening weekend when last year’s laughing-stock, John Carter, is looking at your totals and snickers.
Jack the Giant Slayer lead the way of a first week in March box office that came in like a limping lamb. The Bryan Singer directed film made a poor $28 Million over the weekend coming in over two million short of last year’s box office atom bomb.
If the top of the weekend releases was bad, the rest of the top ten was worse. Despite competition from two other new releases, the hit comedy Identity Thief still managed to hold onto second place with $9.7 million. That put the R-rated comedy over $100 million total and setting it on pace to be director Seth Gordon’s biggest hit yet, providing one of the few silver linings from this weekend.
Coming in third place was new comer 21 and Over, a raunchy comedy trying to mimic Project X‘s strong opening from last year. Needless to say it failed. The film brought in $9 million, helping to prove the old wives tale that you need to market a movie for it to open big.
One thing of positive note that did happen over the weekend was The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey finally surpassing the $1 Billion dollar mark at the world-wide box office. The film brought in just north of $300 Million here in the states, and over seas the film’s gross just passed $700 Million. Even though the film was slightly less well received than the original trilogy, the movie still proved Middle Earth rakes in gobs of cash.
Over all the box office was a major disappointment for the first week in March which had been looking more and more like a big money month in the last few years. Of course there are some big releases still to come so the season as a whole is not a wash, but for now the spring movie season is not looking much better than the February doldrums.
