There were a lot of new releases this weekend and several expansions, but despite the long holiday weekend, only one of them could gain a modicum of traction. That was the horror movie Bye Bye Man, which was met with mostly lousy reviews and a terrible C from Cinemascore, but the Stacy Title flick still managed to grab the number two-spot on Friday. However, the film will end the weekend at number four with around $16.3 million, which is a little more than double the investment STX Entertainment made in the movie in terms of production costs. Fourth for the weekend, however, is the best any of the new releases could muster.
Before we rundown the weekend’s flops, however, let’s recount the holdover successes. Hidden Figures, which surprised box-office experts last weekend and took over the number one spot from Rogue One, hung on to the top spot for the Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, as experts once again underestimated the box-office drawing power of a majority black cast. The film should end the long weekend with an extremely tidy $25 million to bring its total to $60 million. With its A+ Cinemascore, it could have enough box-office legs to reach $100 million, especially if it gets some Oscar recognition.
Rogue One, meanwhile, preliminarily tumbled all the way down to number five this weekend with $16 million, but it did push past the $500 million mark in the United States. Sing, meanwhile, held the number two spot, adding $18 million to its gross, as it remains the top choice at multiplexes for families. The weekend after it cleaned up at the Golden Globes, La La Land improved upon its gross last week and gross another $17 million to put its overall gross just over $75 million. The Damien Chazelle musical is quietly becoming a big box-office hit for Lionsgate.
In at number six with $14.2 million for the 4-day weekend was the first of the weekend’s underperformers. Audiences stayed away from Mark Wahlberg’s marathon-day bombing movie, Patriot’s Day, although the audiences that did attend the movie gave it the year’s second A+ Cinemascore (critics have given it an 80 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, though ironically, Boston critics have nearly uniformly excoriated it). Some are calling it the first movie of Trump’s America, which doesn’t bode for the box-office of Trump-friendly films. It also performed even more poorly than Berg and Wahlberg’s last movie, Deepwater Horizon, which opened with $20 million. However, Patriot’s Day at least benefits from a $40 million budget compared to Deepwater Horizon’s $100 million budget.
The weekend’s flops begin with Monster Trucks, the movie that Paramount Pictures took a $115 million write-down on four months before it was even released, so confident they were that it would flop. They were right: The $13.2 million over the 4-day weekend was bad, but it was especially bad given the movie’s $125 million price tag. It wasn’t a good movie, although it was family-friendly and diverting enough for the kids. I have no idea, however, where the $125 million went. To the extent that it’s bad, it has a lot to do with the cheap-looking special effects. Either way, it was a woeful misfire for Paramount, although the fact that so few people will see it should at least spare Jane Levy’s career much of a hit.
Flop number two was Jamie Foxx and Michelle Monaghan’s Sleepless (Monaghan was also in this weekend’s Patriot’s Day). The film was another that received miserable reviews (11 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), and it had the look of a film that should have gone straight to home streaming. The $10 million it racked up over the four-day weekend, I suppose, is at least better than what it would have received on RedBox, and it shouldn’t have to take too much of a write down for Open Road Pictures because it only cost $30 million and, based on the lack of name recognition, didn’t put a lot of money in promoting it.
The weekend’s third flop, as we could have predicted based on its poor performance in limited release, was Live by Night, Ben Affleck’s directing follow-up to Best Picture Argo. The film — which went wide over the weekend — also received poor reviews, while Vince suggested it was “big dumb fun,” which was almost certainly not Affleck’s intent. It is a bad movie, and it has no hope of recovering the $65 million production budget, as it is not the kind of movie that’s expected to play well overseas, either. Live By Night came in at number eleven with $6.5 million over the four-day weekend.
Meanwhile, Martin Scorsese’s Silence expanded into 750 theaters and delivered numbers that put it somewhere between underperformer and flop. The $2.4 million it made over the four-day weekend was not good, but it was also not expected to put up big numbers, Scorsese’s presence notwithstanding. It, too, will have a rough road to meeting its $50 million production budget unless the Academy gives it some surprise nominations next week when the announcements are made.
Next weekend, the box-office will attempt to turn things around with the release of Michael Keaton’s The Founder, M. Night’s Split, xXx: The Return of Xander Cage, and the expansion of 20th Century Women.
(Via: Deadline, Box Office Mojo, and Forbes)
