“Dragon” Continues Box Office Domination in Fifth Weekend

“Dragon” Continues Box Office Domination in Fifth Weekend

By our guest blogger, Tim Strain

Dreamworks Pictures’ “How to Train Your Dragon” continued its surprisingly successful run at the box office, staving off the competition in its fifth weekend in release. It dropped just 23% from last weekend, amassing another $15 million and bringing its total to $178 million. Considering the progression of its weekend percentage drops and its upcoming competition (“Furry Vengeance” will take away family audiences next weekend and “Iron Man 2” will snatch almost all available IMAX screens on May 7), expect it to end somewhere around “Kung Fu Panda’s” $215 million total. This is a great success story for Dreamworks, whose executives must have been sweating bullets after its lukewarm $43 million opening. Given its 98% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, maybe Hollywood should take the hint--make a good product, and audiences will reward you.

The weekend’s openers were much ado about nothing. J-Lo’s new baby, “The Back-Up Plan,” opened with a tepid $12 million in second place. The woman-does-what-she-wants-only-to-find-completion-through-a-man rom-com offered audiences nothing they hadn’t seen before, and is a middle-of-the-line opener for Lopez. The ensemble-that-nobody-cares-for action pic “The Losers,” starring Zoe Saldana, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Chris Evans and Idris “Forever Stringer Bell” Elba opened to a paltry $9 million in fourth place. It probably won’t make back its $25 million budget, and six months from now, the world will have entirely forgotten the film’s existence.

Disney tries again to re-create the box office success it had with last year’s “Planet Earth” knockoff “Earth” with the more watered-down “Oceans.” It opened with $6 million, which is good for a documentary but bad for a film with an $80 million price tag.

Last weekend’s big openers both lost more than half their business, with “Kick-Ass” dropping from first to fifth place with a $9 million take and the shot-for-shot remake “Death at a Funeral” making $8 million. Both have crossed their modest budgets ($30 million for “Kick-Ass,” $21 million for “Death”), but neither can be considered a big successes based off their hype and casts. “The Joneses,” Roadside Attractions' satire on big-business consumerism starring David Duchovny and Demi Moore, dropped 42% in its second weekend, and has amassed almost $1 million in 193 theaters over 10 days.

Street artist Banksy’s new documentary, “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” has earned some of the best reviews of the year and continues to hold its own in very limited release, grossing $149,000 in 11 theaters for the best per-theater-average of the weekend, more than $13,000. The movie that won Best Foreign Language film, “The Secret in Their Eyes,” continued its success, adding 23 theaters to bring its total to 33, and jumping 123% with a $372,000 weekend, good for an $11,723 PTA. It has a hair more than $600,000 in the bank after 10 days.

In 3D news, “Clash of the Titans” is starting to lose steam, losing more than 300 theaters and dropping 42% in its fourth weekend, grossing $9 million for a sixth place finish. It has turned a profit for Warner Brothers, but hopefully its middle-of-the-line success ($145 million against a $125 million budget in four weeks) is an indicator that 3D isn’t here to stay. But that’s probably a useless hope. “Alice in Wonderland” grossed $2 million and now stands at $327 million after eight weeks. After its $116 million weekend opening, there was a chance it could be the year’s biggest film. With it running out of gas quickly and “Iron Man 2,” “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One,” and “Toy Story 3” all still due to hit theaters, the likelihood of it standing atop the pile when January 1, 2011 rolls around isn’t good.