The box office hit a new low as nothing really clicked with film fans. 2016 is already on track to be the worst year for movies in roughly 100 years and this dismal weekend certainly didn’t help. Movies generated approximately $89M, which is down from the weekend of January 22-24, when the northeast was blanketed in a snow storm. Prior to this, February 5-7 only managed $95M. This weekend was worse than that.
Holdover ‘Sully’ held on to the top spot against minimal competition. More on that in a sec. The new movies were jockeying for female viewers, but ‘Sully’ is drawing a 55% female audience. Not only that, but the Clint Eastwood/Tom Hanks biopic also snuffed out the #4 debut, ‘Snowden’. It seems that in this dicey political climate, folks would rather see a film about an American hero and not a more polarizing figure that some view as a traitor. It probably didn’t help that ‘Sully’ has gotten much better reviews and scored higher with audiences. Both films attracted an older female audience, though and that didn’t help the other new openings.
Both ‘Blair Witch’ (#2, $9.65M) and ‘Bridget Jones’s Baby’ (#3, $8.24M) are follow ups to franchises over a decade old and those fans have apparently moved on. ‘Blair Witch’ has a poor 37% ranking on Rotten Tomatoes and a D CinemaScore, meaning that those that turned out for it, hated it and told their friends, torpedoing the weekend for this horror installment. It doesn’t help that it had a $20M budget which is rather huge for a horror movie these days, so the hit is that much more a loss.
And the fact that female viewers flocked to other movies hurt the 12-year-old ‘Bridget Jones’ follow-up. However, the movie did gangbusters in the UK, so that may help balance things out.
Here are the numbers:
- Sully (Warner Brothers) – $70.5M
- Blair Witch (Lionsgate) – $9.65M
- Bridget Jones’s Baby (Universal) – $8.24M
- Snowden (Open Road) – $8M
- Don’t Breathe (Sony) – $5.6M
If this weekend’s offerings chased after female viewers too hard, next week might be the antidote, when Antoine Fuqua’s ‘The Magnificent Seven’ arrives. And the strongest family film in weeks also swoops in, Warner Brothers’ ‘Storks’.
Who will soar to the top? Or will ‘Sully’ fend them off?
Source: Deadline
