Weekend Box Office: Americans Memorialized Our Fallen Soldiers By Not Seeing ‘Alice Through The Looking Glass’

Disney has money to burn this year, currently owning the top three earners and on pace to pass an astounding four billion any second now, but they burned some of it on Alice Through The Looking Glass. The sequel no one really wanted cost a reported $170 million to make, and this weekend earned just $28 million domestically. That’s $25 million less than tracking, according to BoxOfficeMojo, and even more damning, a worse opening than either The Lone Ranger or Tomorrowland.

Even counting its projected Friday-to-Monday numbers ($35 million), Through The Looking Glass has made less than the original grossed in its first day back in 2010 ($40.8 million). Through the Looking Glass received almost univerally bad reviews, but probably a greater factor was audiences being sick of the concept two thirds of the way through the first one.

Whatever money Alice was going to make in America, it had to make it this weekend or it had to have insanely good buzz. Neither of those things happened. So, with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows waiting to suck up the family audience next weekend and Angry Birds and (ironically) The Jungle Book hanging around, there exists no realistic scenario where the $170 million Alice Through the Looking Glass makes even as much ($116.1m) as the Alice in Wonderland made on its opening weekend six years ago. [Forbes]

All that said, it still made $65 million overseas, which once again supports my thesis: foreigners love Johnny Depp. I can’t wait until he gets a Golden Globe nomination for this.

Alice was number two for the weekend, with the top spot going to X-Men: Apocalypse, which earned $65 million domestic for the weekend. That puts it low center for X-Men movies, ahead of X-Men and First Class, behind X3, Days of Future Past, and X2. Apocalypse received an A- Cinemascore, behind Days of Future Past‘s A and ahead of First Class‘s B+. Alice Through the Looking Glass also received an A-, all of which proves mostly that Cinemascore audiences are idiots.

First Class is a solid comparison domestically as it opened with $55.1 million back in 2011 and went on to gross $145.4 million domestically and just over $200 million internationally.[BoxOfficeMojo]

Elsewhere, Captain America: Civil War just passed Deadpool as 2016’s top domestic gross — worldwide it was already on top, with $1.1 billion.

Next week brings us Khaleesi romancing a quadriplegic in Me Before You, the Lonely Island going Spinal Tap in Popstar: Never Stop Stopping, and the pleasantly ridiculous looking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows. Great work, everyone, let’s go outside.

Film Weekend Per Screen
1 X-Men: Apocalypse $65,000,000 $15,663 $65,000,000
2 Alice Through the Looking Glass $28,112,000 $7,471 $28,112,000
3 The Angry Birds Movie $18,700,000 (-51.0) $4,756 $66,353,000
4 Captain America: Civil War $15,135,000 (-54.1) $4,458 $372,610,000
5 Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising $9,100,000 (-58.2)
$2,664 $38,336,000
6 The Jungle Book $6,967,000 (-36.3) $2,761 $338,478,000
7 The Nice Guys $6,370,000 (-43.1) $2,223 $21,733,000
8 Money Monster $4,250,000 (-39.4) $1,836 $33,902,000
9 Love & Friendship $2,496,000 (+345.9) $5,063 $3,874,000
10 Zootopia $831,000 (-50.7) $1,453 $335,874,000

[chart via Screencrush]

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