I’m not sure what I expected. It was the first weekend in November, which is a good month for movies, but I’m not sure if I thought too much of “Interstellar” (our review here) or if I underestimated a Disney film. “Big Hero 6” (our review here) looked wonderful, don’t get me wrong here, but something about “Interstellar” just picked at me. I thought it would be huge, but I think I let my bias pull me in. Regardless, both films did well. “Big Hero 6” earned about $6 million over estimates, while “Interstellar” was a little under estimates and in 200 less theaters. A solid chunk of “Interstellar” came from IMAX showings, which isn’t a good sign. The movie was just a hard one to market to a wide audience. There wasn’t much else around and the Top 5 doesn’t look to different than in previous weeks.
| Rank | Title | Weekend Gross | % Change | Total Gross | Week # | ||||||
| 1 | Big Hero 6 | $56,215,889 | – | $56,215,889 | 1 | ||||||
| 2 | Interstellar | $47,510,360 | – | $49,661,813 | 1 | ||||||
| 3 | Gone Girl | $6,207,419 | -26.8% | $145,535,841 | 6 | ||||||
| 4 | Ouija | $5,870,170 | -45.3% | $43,325,255 | 3 | ||||||
| 5 | Fury (2014) | $5,628,450 | -36.2% | $69,396,679 | 4 | ||||||
“Ouija” dropped down to 4th and “Nightcrawler” dropped down to 7th while “St. Vincent” moved up to 6th. All on the lower end of their earnings. With a lot of bigger films coming soon they’ll drop out entirely next week. Speaking of next week, “Dumb and Dumber Too” is the biggest release for the coming weekend and after that we get another Hunger Games. Things will start to look up at the box office soon.
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 films 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.