Weekend Box Office Report: July 18-20 2014

By Kip Mooney • On • In News News 0

 

BOX OFFICE REPORT July 18-20, 2014(estimates from BoxOfficeMojo.com)

TOP 51. Dawn of the Planet... ($36.0 million)2. The Purge: Anarchy ($28.3 million)3. Planes: Fire & Rescue ($18.0 million)4. Sex Tape ($15.0 million)5. Transformers 4  ($10.0 million)

The apes continued their reign, taking in another $36 million. Dawn has now made more in 10 days than Rise made in three weekends. It's a sequel doing what studios hope sequels do: making more than the last one. It deserves it too. I'd argue Dawn is the best blockbuster of the summer.

Its take this weekend was enough to fend off all the competition, including two sequels that didn't do what they were supposed to. Anarchy, a follow-up to last year's surprise success The Purge, provided the biggest horror opening of 2014. But it's still less than the original.

That was also the story for Planes: Fire & Rescue. The sequel to the original, which Disney planned to release straight-to-video before it realized there was more money to be made, made only $18 million. That's just a few shy of the original, which somehow stuck around to make $90 million. That's likely out of reach for Fire & Rescue, but there's plenty of merchandise to make up for that.

And the humiliation continued for Sex Tape. Even after having their late-night tryst unbelievably uploaded to "the cloud" and seen by strangers and friends alike, the movie made just $15 million, far less than other raunchy comedies this year. Still enough to beat Transformers in its fourth weekend, but that's not saying much. 

Outside the top 5: - This Weekend's Indie Champ: Boyhood, Richard Linklater's epic coming-of-age story, continued to ride its rave reviews to box office success. Now on 33 screens, it averaged $36,303.

- Not all Christian movies can taste the success of Heaven is for Real or God's Not Dead. Persecuted, a thriller with a religious bent, made less than $1 million on 736 screens.

- Lots of independent films had openings over $10,000: Italian romance A Five Star Life ($16.5k), Michel Gondry's typically quirky Mood Indigo ($25.1k) and the conservative documentary There's No Place Like Utopia ($27.8k).

Next week: It's a tough call. Do audiences love The Rock so much that they go for a live-action Hercules? Do they love Scarlett Johansson so much they buy her as a drugged-up superheroine in Lucy? Or will they reject them both and keep the apes in control? I'm half-heartedly guessing we smell what The Rock is cooking and Hercules wins the weekend with $30 million.

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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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