Did anyone go to the movies over the weekend? Be honest now. The marketplace was a non-event thanks in large part to there being no major wide releases. Hollywood does this a few times each year; it takes a week off as if it had to take vacation days or risk losing them by the end of the year. As such, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 repeats again for the third weekend in a row. It may have claimed victory with another $21 million to boost its domestic haul to $257M (or $80 mil. less at what Catching Fire had after three weeks), but it was an awful weekend overall.
The arrival of Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings could mean the end of Katniss’s reign atop the box office (and it probably will), but in a few weeks we have The Hobbit: Trust Us This Is The Last One opening wide and it will make tons of money that Gollum will want some of that precious moola.
There was one new title that was part of the top ten and that was Fox’s The Pyramid. What, you never heard of it? Don’t worry, no one else did either. The studio dumped this not-screened-for-press horror flick in around 600 theaters and the $1.3 million gross reflects the lack of attention.
The big news was what was transpiring in limited release. The Weinstein Company nearly cracked the top 10 with The Imitation Game. With another healthy per-screen average of $50k, the period drama made another cool million. Fox Searchlight’s Wild starring Reese Witherspoon nabbed $30k to make $630,000 overall.
To give hope that Jake Gyllenhaal may nab an Oscar nomination for Nightcrawler, Open Road put the film back into the rotation with a 800 screen re-release. It also made $1 million to bring its gross to date to $30 million.
Check out the full top ten below.
01. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 1 – $21.6M ($257M)
02. Penguins of Madagascar – $11.1M ($49.5M)
03. Horrible Bosses 2 – $8.6M ($36M)
04. Big Hero 6 – $8.1M ($177M)
05. Interstellar – $8M ($158M)
06. Dumb And Dumber To – $4.2M ($78.1M)
07. The Theory Of Everything – $2.6M ($13.6M)
08. Gone Girl – $1.5M ($162.8M)
09. The Pyramid – $1.3M
10. Birdman – $1.1M ($18.9M)
