Overall, The Martian proves to be a cerebral movie viewing experience, offering a nice mix of scientific knowledge and entertainment.
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In this photo provided by Twentieth Century Fox, Matt Damon, from left, as Astronaut Mark Watney, Jessica Chastain as Melissa Lewis, Sebastian Stan as Chris Beck, Kate Mara as Beth Johanssen, and Aksel Hennie as Alex Vogel, appear in a scene in the film, “The Martian“. The New York Times reports that the film, “serves as a nice plug for NASA, which has returned the favour by pushing the movie on its website”.
“The Martian” is made for $108 million.
With an opening weekend gross of around $25,000,000, this might have had half of The Martian’s opening, but its momentum shows that Matt Damon is the Tom Hanks of our time, as long as he can shape up and stop putting his foot in his mouth. If that happens to The Martian, it will surpass Gravity’s October record. As far as Hollywood is concerned, space travel has become a recurring motif in recent years. Could this drive The Martian’s Saturday higher than that of Gravity? Those screens were already reserved for Sony’s The Walk. “The needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many”, or something like that.
“Gravity’s” advantage over the other two films is its cinematic style and the camera’s relationship to the story. Its domestic total is now at $36.5 million. One thing is for certain: it should have no problem becoming the biggest hit of the early fall season.
The flawless Guy, about a woman’s tryst with a man who isn’t what he seems, earned $2.4 million, finishing tenth. The second film in the Maze Runner franchise has scored $63.2 million domestically so far and $211 million worldwide on a budget of $61 million. All IMAX screens this weekend were occupied by Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk. Yet that works two ways…it either keeps people from the theater or packs them into it as other options are limited. This weekend’s biggest failure was The Weinstein Company’s Shanghai, which opened after years of delays to a dismal $26,400 on 103 screens, for a per-theatre average of $256.
The Sony Pictures Animation sequel, which cost about $80 million to make, has collected about $90.5 million domestically to date. A ideal score does not mean a flawless film, but it does mean a film that stands as a prime example of its own genre released at the ideal moment. It was only later that, at the request of his fans, he released an Amazon Kindle edition that went on to sell 35,000 copies in three months and that’s how The Martian eventually caught the attention of publishers.
After two weekends in less than a hundred theaters, “Sicario” has moved to wide expansion and, as a result, brought in an estimated $12 million this weekend. That’s a pretty good start for the film, which is riding a wave of critical buzz (93% on RT) and is well-liked by audiences (A- CinemaScore).
This was really one of those weekends where it wasn’t “what would top the box office?” but “how much would it earn?”
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Everest dropped off heavily in its second weekend of wide release.
