An amazing January box office, fueled by American Sniper and Taken 3, has given way to February and it looks like the hits keep a’coming. This time, success comes in the form of a sponge.
- Spongebob Movie: Sponge Out of Water had a brilliant February opening, grossing $53M against a $75M budget. This is darn impressive for a property that has been on TV ten times a day since the 90s. With decent reviews and no real family competition until March 13’s Cinderella, only mediocre word of mouth (a weak “B” Cinemascore result) could keep this film from having legs.
- Jupiter Ascending, which I reviewed HERE, pretty much ends the Wachowski siblings’ career as directors who can get big budget funding. The scifi clunker earned only $19 against a production budget of$176M!!! Heads will role over at Warner Brothers for the people responsible for greenlighting this. Only the Chinese loving the FX and not caring about the story can salvage anything from this situation!
- American Sniper fell out of the top spot for the first time since opening wide, but still took in a healthy $24.4M. That’s still better than Jupiter. Sniper’s push for $400M now seems unrealistic, but it should still pass HG3 and GotG for the box office crown among 2014 openers (though we all know Sniper is really a 2015 movie).
- Seventh Son finally saw U.S. theaters, but no one in U.S. theaters saw Seventh Son. The panned fantasy film brought in only $7M. Oddly enough, it has done decent business overseas, pulling in nearly $90M. Again…probably the Chinese. The LOVED Transformers 4.
Gabbing Geek 