‘Kung Fu Panda 3’ kicked butt at the theater this weekend, landing at #1, dethroning multiple Academy Award nominee ‘The Revenant’ which took the top spot last week. Grossing $41 million, the Jack Black animated comedy falls short of the debuts of the two prior movies in the series. ‘Kung Fu panda 2’ took in $47.7M its opening weekend, but the first movie is still tops debuting with $60.2M.
‘The Revenant’ took in a far more modest $12.4M for second place. ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens‘ continues to deliver, raking in an extra $10.8M for third place. Meanwhile, ‘Ride Along 2’ hung in at #5 with another $8.3M.
Other than ‘Kung Fu Panda 3’, the only other new movie to crack the Top Five was ‘The Finest Hours’ starring Chris Pine and Casey Affleck, which only generated $10.3M to take fourth place. This follows the lackluster performance of Ron Howard’s ‘In The Heart of the Sea’ indicating, it seems, that audiences aren’t interested in these waterlogged true-life dramas.
It can’t help that while Pine was promoting this film, all anyone wanted to ask about was ‘Wonder Woman‘ and to a lesser degree ‘Star Trek Beyond‘. It’s hard to drum up interest in the now, when all anyone cares about is what’s next.
- Kung Fu Panda 3 (20th Century Fox) $41 million
- The Revenant (20th Century Fox) $12.4 million
- Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Disney) $10.8 million
- The Finest Hours (Disney) $10.3 million
- Ride Along 2 (Universal) $8.3 million
New spoof ’50 Shades of Black’ flopped taking in only $6.2M for a ninth place finish.
Domestically, ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ has grossed a whopping $895.4M and there is still hope that it could reach that elusive $1 billion mark. It has already crossed $2B worldwide. There has been faint buzz that Disney could tack the trailer for ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story‘ (which was pushed back to December) onto ‘The Force Awakens’ to drive audiences back to theaters to catch their next peek into the ‘Star Wars’ universe. But those are FAINT rumblings. As it stands right now, the studio is still planning to debut the trailer with ‘Captain America: Civil War’ in May.
Next weekend doesn’t see any big budget tentpoles debuting, but movies that could generate some interest include the Coen Brothers’ star-studded ‘Hail, Caesar’, Nicholas Sparks adaptation ‘The Choice’ and period spoof ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’.
Check back to see how these new pictures perform against the reigning champs!
Source: IGN
