After a few
weeks of the box office in the doldrums, with some lackluster numbers, there
was a very welcome jump this weekend, due to 2 highly anticipated releases
There was,
of course, Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi film spectacle "Interstellar," which got
all the attention. Some love it to death (one friend calls it one of greatest
films he’s ever seen, and he’s seen everything; and he hated
the "Dark Knight" trilogy). Others, such as our own Andre Seewood, who, according to
his Facebook page, think it’s basically nothing but an overrated load of pretentious
twaddle. And I even I admit I still couldn’t figure out what the hell was going
on during the last 30 minutes of the film. At least, one thing is for sure – it’s
got people talking.
But surprisingly
(not to me however), is that the film did not perform as well as expected, pulling
in $50 million, which is far short of the projected $65-70 million that analysts were
predicting.
Was it possibly
because of the film’s nearly 3-hour length, which cuts into the number of
times the film can be screened per day; or maybe because it’s too convoluted for
its own good? Who knows?
The film, as
I thought it would, got beat out by Disney’s animated movie "Big Hero 6," with $56
million, which should not be a surprise, considering that Disney animated films always do well ("Frozen" is still the highest grossing animated film ever), and
that "Big Hero 6" is based on a Marvel comic book, which means that the film
already had a fanboy base to built on.
But both
films will no doubt continue to have very strong b.o. legs, and will rack up the
dough for the next few weeks.
However, the
biggest per screen average by far was for "The Theory of Everything," the film
about the early life and marriage of Steven Hawkins, which grossed $207,000 on
only 5 screens, for a $41,000 per screen average.
With the exception
of "Nighcrawler," last week’s no. 1 film, which took a huge drop, all the other films
in the top ten stayed pretty much where they were last weekend.