Disney princess movies are back. It’s not that they ever left, but with the live-action Cinderella opening with $70 million all signs point to more reworkings of Disney’s animated classics will be on the way. According to Deadline, the studio plans to have Beauty and the Beast in theaters March 17, 2017.
Cinderella topped last year’s Maleficent opening weekend by a little more than $500k and this was without the added push of 3D surcharges. That film would go on to gross more than $750 million worldwide. A lot of that was in large part to Angelina Jolie’s visibility as the titular character, but in our review we exclaimed that Kenneth Branagh’s take on the tale of a kind maiden and her ugly stepsisters was better than both Disney’s reworkings of Sleeping Beauty and Alice in Wonderland.
The film is off to a magical start overseas where it also added another $62.4 million to bring its weekend total to $132.5 million. The coming weeks will be tough as we inch closer to the releases of DreamWorks Animation’s Home plus franchise sequels Insurgent and Furious 7. You can bank on that last one having an opening greater than $115 million.
It wasn’t all about princesses at the cineplex as Liam Neeson’s Run All Night was vying for older audiences. Having announced to the world that he was retiring from being an action star, was the $11 million opening for Run All Night a sign that audiences are tired of seeing the 62-year-old Irishman kick ass on screen. What’s disappointing is that the film isn’t a trainwreck like Taken 3 from a few months ago. Scott Sawitz called it a “strong genre film” in his review, which it is. Bad title notwithstanding, the film has an old-school action thriller sensibility about it thanks in large part to Neeson and Ed Harris. They have scenes together reminiscent of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Heat. I also liked the idea of Neeson using a revolver and driving an old Trans-Am and not carrying a cell phone. If you miss it in theaters, you may be seeing it in Redbox in the middle period of the summer blockbuster season.
Outside of the two new releases the most significant Top 10 stories are Fox’s Kingsman: The Secret Service and American Sniper. For Kingsman it has carried over well four weeks after its debut in theaters. It finished in third place and in five weeks it has grossed $107.3 million in U.S. Clint Eastwood’s Sniper is now among the top 30 all time domestic box office list, right between Transformers: Dark of the Moon and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
This week’s full top ten below.
01. Cinderella — $70 million
02. Run All Night — $11 million
03. Kingsman: The Secret Service — $6.2 million ($107.3M)
04. Focus — $5.8 million ($44M)
05. Chappie — $5.8 million ($23.3M)
06. Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel — $5.7 million ($18M)
07. The SpongeBob Movie — $4.1 million ($154.6M)
08. McFarland, USA — $3.6 million ($34.9M)
09. American Sniper — $2.9 million ($341.5M)
10. Fifty Shades Of Grey — $2.9 million ($161.4M)
