Weekend Box Office Report: April 5-7 2013

By Kip Mooney • On • In News News 0

BOX OFFICE REPORT "” April 5-7, 2013(estimates from BoxOfficeMojo.com)

TOP 5

1. Evil Dead ($26 million)2. G.I. Joe: Retaliation ($21.1 million)(tie) The Croods ($21.1 million)4. Jurassic Park 3D ($18.2 million)5. Olympus Has Fallen ($10 million)

 

I should never bet against horror, especially that of the ultra-violent variety. I mean, there were seven Saw movies and two Hostels. Whether a movie needs to be remade or not has never been the issue. That's why we've seen all the landmark horror films (Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street) get remade and lose any sense of what made the originals so special. And so another classic chiller has been redone with a younger, prettier cast with all the humor and weirdness removed, replaced with gallons upon gallons of gore. 

But audiences seem to love that, so Evil Dead opened in first place with an estimated $26 million. That's actually down among recent horror remakes, but still better than bottom-feeders like My Bloody Valentine, Prom Night and When a Stranger Calls. This makes sense, as Sam Raimi's Evil Dead series has always had more of a cult following than iconic films featuring Michael Myers, Jason and Freddy Krueger.

Second place was locked in a dead heat between Retaliation's second weekend and The Croods third. The latter will likely be the winner since family movies tend to perform better on Sundays than any other type of film.

Jurassic Park 3D didn't do quite as well as I thought it would, but $18.2 million and fourth place is quite impressive for a 20-year-old movie on a very busy weekend. Plus, it already made a killing during its initial run. In 1993, it made $357 million and became the year's top-grossing movie. That's the equivalent of nearly $700 million today.

Outside the top 5: - Big weekend for the arthouse as well. Danny Boyle's mind-bending Trance won the weekend, averaging $34,000 on each of its four screens. It expands next weekend.- Shane Carruth's self-released low-budget sci-fi head-scratcher Upstream Color made $31,500 on its lone screen. He's only made one film before this, the Dallas-shot Primer, about two dudes who accidentally create a time machine. It's absolutely worth watching, and it's available on Netflix Instant. - Derek Cianfrance's The Place Beyond the Pines (my review will be up later this week) still managed to do impressive business in its first weekend of expansion, taking in $23,167 on each of its 30 screens. It's expected to go into wide release next weekend.

Next week: We'll be treated to another unsubtle, glossed-over biopic of athletes who had to overcome racism, that will somehow still manage to be inspirational. See also: The Express, Glory Road. I fully expect 42 to just be white players saying things like, "You don't belong here," before Jackie Robinson hits a bunch of home runs in a montage set to Jay-Z's "Brooklyn Go Hard." It will be the No. 1 movie with $18 million. There's also, uh, Scary Movie 5, which expects us to laugh at a Black Swan parody in 2013, and expects us to be interested when Anna Faris isn't even around. I'm predicting $9 million at best. 

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About Kip Mooney

Kip Mooney
Like many film critics born during and after the 1980s, my hero is Roger Ebert. The man was already the best critic in the nation when he won the Pulitzer in 1975, but his indomitable spirit during and after his recent battle with cancer keeps me coming back to read not only his reviews but his insightful commentary on the everyday. But enough about a guy you know a lot about. I knew I was going to be a film critic—some would say a snob—in middle school, when I had to voraciously defend my position that The Royal Tenenbaums was only a million times better than Adam Sandler’s remake of Mr. Deeds. From then on, I would seek out Wes Anderson’s films and avoid Sandler’s like the plague. Still, I like to think of myself as a populist, and I’ll be just as likely to see the next superhero movie as the next Sundance sensation. The thing I most deplore in a movie is laziness. I’d much rather see movies with big ambitions try and fail than movies with no ambitions succeed at simply existing. I’m also a big advocate of fun-bad movies like The Room and most of Nicolas Cage’s work. In the past, I’ve written for The Dallas Morning News and the North Texas Daily, which I edited for a semester. I also contributed to Dallas-based Pegasus News, which in the circle of life, is now part of The Dallas Morning News, where I got my big break in 2007. Eventually, I’d love to write and talk about film full-time, but until that’s a viable career option, I work as an auditor for Wells Fargo. I hope to one day meet my hero, go to the Toronto International Film Festival, and compete on Jeopardy. Until then, I’m excited to share my love of film with you.

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