Box Office Weekend: The Martian Rides High Again

What an incredibly disgusting weekend at the box office for new releases.

“The Last Witch Hunter“, starring Vin Diesel as the eponymous witch hunter, was distributed by Lions Gate Entertainment and grossed $10.8 million in fourth place.

Universal’s “Steve Jobs” – directed by Danny Boyle, written by Aaron Sorkin and starring Michael Fassbender as the Apple co-founder – was the highest-grossing limited release of the year when it opened in four theaters two week ago. As late as Friday afternoon, after it had been revealed that the movie had averaged $36 a theater in Thursday night screening, box-office analyst types were still predicting that Jem And The Holograms would make between $4 million and $5 million in the first weekend-mostly because it’s nearly impossible for a movie opening in so many theaters to make any less, even if does mostly look like a Disney Channel Original randomly interspersed with YouTube clips.

Two lower-budgeted releases – the cartoon-to-film adaptation Jem and the Holograms and the Bill Murray vehicle Rock the Kasbah – both opened outside the Top 10. Based on the 1980s animated series, the film opened on 2,413 screens, averaging $545 per screen, to take 15th place.

Also out in the cold in even more spectacular spectacular fashion was Jem And The Holograms which grossed a paltry $1.3 million.

There’s time yet for Steve Jobs to recover-the movie’s been rapturously received, and awards buzz should buoy its long-view performance-but a few will argue that its flop is another symptom of the modern moviegoer’s aversion to quality filmmaking. The film landed in fifteenth place overall with a meager $1.3M at the box-office. And with no certainty that Paramount will reveal how those later sales go, the only way we might learn of whether this is a success will be to see if they and other studios try the same thing soon. “Audiences, and particularly older audiences for whom these films have great appeal, they’re staying away”.

All eyes were on “Paranormal“, the fifth installment of the horror franchise and one that is being used by Paramount to test a new distribution strategy that gets movies on out on home video much sooner than usual. DreamWorks, Participant Media and Disney (NYSE:DIS) partnered on the $40-M historical drama, which fell just 26%.

The domestic total for the outer space blockbuster has reached $166.4 million and is on target to reach $200 million stateside. The two movies became the third and fourth worst wide-release openings in box office history, coming behind 2012’s “The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure” ($443,901) and 2008’s “Delgo” ($511,920). So far, it has earned $13.4-M from 53 markets for an early global box office of $24.2-M. “Steve Jobs”, he said, is not your typical wide release.

Advertisement

“There’re just too many films being released into the marketplace”. But by next weekend it will have about equaled what “Interstellar” did during its whole run. “Goosebumps” had a reasonable 34% second week fall, while “Crimson Peak” shed 58% of its weak first weekend and will end up grossing somewhere in the range of fellow fall dud “Pan”.