Last weekend box office’s #1 movie, ‘A Quiet Place’ held up extremely well in its sophomore frame, but thanks to a surge in family business, newcomer ‘Rampage‘ won the weekend. The Dwayne Johnson video game picture raked in $34.5 million, versus ‘A Quiet Place”s perfectly respectable $32.6M. In fact, on Friday, it looked as though the John Krasinski-directed horror film would come out on top thanks to Friday the 13th, but things evened out over the weekend.
‘Rampage’, like most Johnson movies, is a crowd-pleaser. Audiences gave it a CinemaScore of “A-,” leading to great word-of-mouth, which is spurring others to check out the popcorn flick. That matches the score of Johnson’s last movie ‘Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle’ which, thanks to strong audience reaction, went on to outperform ‘Spider-Man’ and become Sony’s top grosser of all time.
Warner Brothers’ president of domestic distribution, Jeff Goldstein said:
“Dwayne Johnson is a closer. His fans follow him on such an aggressive way on social media and he inspires and excites them to get them to see his movie. He’s a marketing machine, he’s his own brand and this was a coordinated effort throughout our whole company.”
Johnson himself popped up at AMC’s Burbank theater to surprise attendees, but the movie performed strongly from coast to coast in big cities and small towns and Johnson appeals to all ages, races and both males and females, drawing a mixed audience.
Universal’s $5M horror film ‘Truth or Dare’ opened to a decent $19M, although this was less than the $26M that ‘Happy Death Day’ made during its first weekend. ‘A Quiet Place’ stole some of ‘Truth or Dare”s potential audience– the female, under 25 crowd. Universal targeted its core demo by advertising on shows popular with them like ‘Empire’, ‘The Voice’ and ‘Riverdale’. They also created a Snapchat filter and delivered exclusive footage via Lucy Hale’s social media on ‘Truth or Dare Tuesdays’. Fans are drawn by stars like Hale and Violet Beane, but mainly by the deformed faces shown in the trailers. “It’s creeping them out… the distorted face of the co-stars has definitely found the target audience,” according to analysts Relish Mix.
Top Five:
- Rampage (New Line/Warner Brothers) – $34.5M
- A Quiet Place (Paramount) – $32.6M
- Truth or Dare (Universal) – $19M
- Ready Player One (Warner Brothers/Village Roadshow) – $11.2M
- Blockers (Universal) – $10.3M
Though not quite in the Top Five, Fox Searchlight’s animated Wes Anderson film ‘Isle of Dogs’ is doing major crossover business. It’s made a respectable $18.4M and has expanded to nearly 2,000 screens.
There are still two weeks before ‘Avengers: Infinity War’, so ‘Rampage’ should remain on top next week. Amy Schumer’s ‘I Feel Pretty’ is opening, along with ‘Super Troopers 2’, the sequel to the 2001 cult comedy.
Check back to see how things pan out!
Source: Deadline
