After “21 Jump Street” became a sleeper success I still can’t say I would have picked its sequel to win over a sequel to a movie like “How to Train Your Dragon.” Here we are though, with “22 Jump Street” being the second all time R-Rated box office opener and “How to Train Your Dragon 2” doing well but still almost $10 million under Tatum and Hill. Dragon even had the benefit of opening in almost 1k more theaters. On the plus side Dragon won’t have much competition for that kids audience and should be able to ride out the summer performing solidly. Along with the success of these two films we also saw that “The Fault in our Stars” took a huge 69% drop and fell to fifth place behind “Edge of Tomorrow” that dipped 44%. It seems with word of mouth and some better trailers Edge may hit that $100 million mark.
- 22 Jump Street: $57 million and the top spot makes fora successful sequel. Please no 23 Jump Street though.
- How to Train Your Dragon 2: Better than the first but still a bit low for a June animated release, $49.4 million.
- Maleficent: Dropping spots equal to weeks of release, this one eases down to $18.5 and a 46% drop.
- Edge of Tomorrow: $16.1 million in week two pushes Edge up to $56.6 million total domestic, but $237.6 worldwide.
- The Fault in our Stars: A big dip off last weeks front loaded winner, $14.7 million and $80.7 total domestic.
Next week is musicals and sequels so I except our top two to still be top five.
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.