By Todd Allen
Dark Knight Rises could only hold the #1 spot for three weeks. This week, two new films claimed the top spots in their debut. The Jason Bourne saga takes a page from Doctor Who and has a new actor as another agent trained to assume the Jason Bourne identity and The Bourne Legacy resonated well enough with the audience to take the top spot. At number two, Will Farell and Zach Galifianakis star in The Campaign. When your political farce debuts at roughly the same time the Vice-Presidential is announced, you had really good scheduling.
Here are what the weekend estimates look like, per Box Office Mojo:
1 The Bourne Legacy $40,265,000
2 The Campaign $27,440,000
3 The Dark Knight Rises $19,540,000
4 Hope Springs $15,600,000
5 Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days $8,200,000
6 Total Recall (2012) $8,100,000
7 Ice Age: Continental Drift $6,750,000
8 Ted $3,290,000
9 Step Up Revolution $2,850,000
10 The Watch $2,200,000
10 The Amazing Spider-Man $2,200,000
Dark Knight is coasting down, dropping 45.3% in it’s 4th weekend. It needs another ~$17M to move into #2 for the year, domestically. That will probably take 7-10 days. With an estimated $250M budget, you’d kind of like to see $500M domestic and I’m 100% sure Dark Knight will get there. Eyeballing it’s looking more like $475M to me. Still, with $835M global, and counting, this is still a money maker, despite the huge budget. And that’s before the home theater market.
As we move into an action/adventure stage for the Big films, we find two SF/F films as the big losers this week. Total Recall, which didn’t exactly inspire anyone last weeks drops 68.3%. With only $44M in receipts against a $125M budget, this one is going to struggle to find black ink at the box office. The current numbers don’t have it as having opened yet in many foreign markets and overseas is where it needs to find its salvation.
Then you have The Watch. This film was supposed to be called Neighborhood Watch, but had to make a last minute change to a dull, generic name after a shooting in Florida. Of course, really poor reviews didn’t help it either. The Watch dropped 66.% and had a truly sad $894 per screen average. That average is not in the top 20, so I expect there to be a drastically smaller number of screens next week. It’s grossed ~$32M against a $68M budget, so things are looking pretty dire domestically. It doesn’t appear to have opened overseas yet.
In superhero film news, Spidey may or may not have dropped out of the top 10. We’ll have to wait for the actual totals to determine if it’s at #10 or #11. This will go down as the least successful Spider-Man film. Amazing Spider-Man is pushing $700M globally, so there’s a good chance of a sequel, but Sony’s probably going to be rethinking the budget.
The Avengers is also still alive and well. It’s on 220 screens with a per screen average of $1218, adding another $268K to its coffers.
Interestingly, The Hunger Games is now in its 21st week on the big screen and is performing slightly better than the Avengers in its old age: 260 screens, $1250 per screen average, $325K. 21 weeks is a long time for a film to be able to hold on to 260 screens, but it’s making money and presumably selling popcorn.
Next week’s big debut is the 3200 screen-occupying Expendables 2, 500-screen Jennifer Garner Disney family-fantasy vehicle The Odd Life of Timothy Green, and 3,100 screen animated feature ParaNorman.
” The Jason Bourne saga takes a page from Doctor Who and has a new actor as another agent trained to assume the Jason Bourne identity”
Um. No. It’s a spin-off. Renner isn’t ‘Bourne’.
It’s more akin to The Jeffersons and All in the Family, than it is to Dr Who.
So just to be clear – if DKR is at #3 in sales for the year so far – I’m guessing the top 2 are Avengers and Hunger games?
And who is at 4 and 5? :)