Oof! This weekend was a rough one at the box office, folks. Film after film continued to underperform and it looks like Hollywood is in for a long summer. Let’s inspect the damage shall we?
Our first victim is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows which opened to a very weak $35.2 million. That’s a staggering $30 million below its predecessor’s $65.5 million opening in August of 2014. I’m not entirely sure what went wrong here since everything seemed to be lining up for it to be a sure-fire hit. My best guess would be that a significant amount of those who saw the original weren’t impressed so they didn’t care to check out a sequel (the 5.9/10 IMDB score for the original backs me up).
In second place, last weeks moderate underperformer X-men: Apocalypse has turned into a major underperformer. The film dropped an alarming 66% from last weekend for a gross of $22 million this weekend. While The Last Stand and X-men Origins: Wolverine did boast larger drops in their second weekends (around 67% and 69% respectively), they also had much higher openings. With $116 million in the bank so far, this thing has no chance of hitting $200 million and may not even pass X-men Origins: Wolverine’s $179 million total gross. Hopefully for Fox, the grosses in Asia and Europe will make up for the lack of interest in North America.
So, how about some good news? The new Emilia Clarke/Sam Claflin romantic drama Me Before You got off to a very good start in third place with $18.2 million. I know my dear ScreenGeek readers probably aren’t all that interested in this one, but I’m sure you can appreciate the irony in a quaint little romance movie kicking the butts of both the X-men and the Ninja Turtles. This one only has a $20 million budget, so this ought to turn out to be a solid investment for Warner Brothers.
Disney’s Alice Through the Looking Glass continues to bomb with a 60% drop for a weekend gross of $10.6 million. $100 million is out of reach which means that this won’t even make one third of the $334 million that its predecessor pulled in. Yikes.
Andy Samberg’s Pop Star: Never Stop Never Stopping flopped in eighth place with $4.6 million. Maybe they can blame the title…
Well, that’s it for me! Do these movies deserve to underperform? Are you happy that people are finally rejecting sequels and prequels? Did you actually see Pop Star? Sound off below!
Source: Box Office Mojo