While it still stayed in 1st place, “Fifty Shades of Grey” plummeted 74% from its opening weekend. That is the second largest drop ever, the title holder being the 2009 version of “Friday the 13th.” Now that isn’t to say that Fifty Shades isn’t still successful, just that week 1 was not a good barometer for the films life. It most likely will not crack $200 million, or possibly even $175 million.
“Kingsman: The Secret Service” fell a more standard 52% and which shows that the film has good word of mouth. It’s earned $67 million so far and could break $100 million if it continues to perform well. Spongebob also held well, dropping about 47% and is now over $125 million total domestic gross.
The 3 new releases were “McFarland, USA” (our review here), “The Duff,” and “Hot Tub Time Machine 2” (our review here). Let’s talk hot tubs, it bombed. It has a shoestring budget so it’s not the worst thing that it only made a little under $6 million but still…it made under $6 million. I mean it still did better than Johnny Depp’s latest movie.
Now “Mcfarland, USA” seems like your standard Disney movie…and that is exactly what it was and made about the same as it’s last one, “Million Dollar Arm.” “The DUFF” wasn’t heavily marketed…to my demo, it was heavily targeted to women under 25 and they are the ones who went to see it. They made up almost 70% of the audience. It’s not a big film, and it’s not going to make much but it hit right about where the studio wanted it. It’s already got it’s budget back and then some, everything else is icing on the cake.
| Rank | Title | Studio | Weekend Gross | % Change | Total Gross | Week # | |||||
| 1 | Fifty Shades of Grey | Uni. | $22,259,030 | -73.9% | $129,161,540 | 2 | |||||
| 2 | Kingsman: The Secret Service | Fox | $18,346,023 | -49.3% | $67,926,972 | 2 | |||||
| 3 | The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water | Par. | $16,573,682 | -47.3% | $126,245,516 | 3 | |||||
| 4 | McFarland, USA | BV | $11,020,798 | – | $11,020,798 | 1 | |||||
| 5 | The DUFF | LGF | $10,809,149 | – | $10,809,149 | 1 | |||||
A quick note on budgets and dollar figures:
Films making back their budgets is a good sign, but that is just the money to film. It doesn’t include distribution and marketing. Marketing can cost as much as a film. That big Superbowl spot is spendy. So take that into account when judging a film’s success. Hitting $100 million isn’t the same as it once was.
All dollar amounts in the top 5 come from estimates based on ticket sales unless noted otherwise. Occasionally this article will be published when actual results come out, which is usually late Monday afternoon. For more about this and other ins and outs of movie tracking click here.