Who needs monsters when you have minions? That’s the takeaway from this weekend’s box-office report, which finds Despicable Me 2 on top for a second week with a gross of $44.8 million while Grown-Ups 2 and Pacific Rim slugged it out for second and third with $42.5 million and $38.3 million, respectively.
What’s that? The $4.2 million gap means it wasn’t even close, and audiences decisively supported Adam Sandler’s guys-hanging-out comedy over Guillermo del Toro’s celebration of kaiju mayhem?
Ah, dammit. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Re: your tweet “Which one of Friday’s movies will I describe as “unwatchable” in this week’s paper? The answer may surprise you!”
I’m guessing Only God Forgives.
Do you think Pacific Rim would have done better if it hadn’t opened almost exclusively in high-priced IMAX and AVX theatres?
Here in Toronto at least I could only find a single screen that was a normal 2D showing, with normal ticket prices. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a lot of people willing to see it, but not pay extra to see it.
No, the movie tracked terribly in audience awareness surveys. The studio has known for weeks that it was going to bomb. Frankly, it did better than a lot of people expected.
And I think the premium theater exclusivity was only for the Thursday night early opening. It played in regular theaters on Friday.
No really, I went on Friday night and there was only one normal theatre playing it… everything else was AVX or IMAX or both.
But maybe they figured that since awareness was low, they would try to squeeze as much $$ as possible from those people.