Proving yet again that the traditional Hollywood wisdom stating women don’t go to the movies is BS, Disney’s Angelina Jolie-starring take on the classic villain Maleficent racked up $70 million domestically and $100 million overseas for the weekend. That’s the biggest ever opening for a Jolie-fronted film, and quite a bit ahead of the previous female fronted movie to open in this weekend’s slot, 2012’s Snow White and the Huntsman. Furthermore, the audience for the film was 60 percent female and 51 percent over the age of 25, with a significant portion also devoted to families (45 percent) and an A Cinemascore, suggesting that Maleficent is going to have some legs in the coming weeks.
As an interesting flipside to the woman-fronted weekend, Seth Macfarlane’s newest comedy, A Million Ways To Die In The West, also opened, but only to the tune of $17.1 million. It didn’t help that the film got largely negative reviews and relied a bit too heavily on the Family Guy/Ted connections of Macfarlane’s past to sell tickets, but the film still barely opened to a third of what Ted opened with in 2012, and less than what several other unsuccessful comedies in June past have opened with. The audience was 55 percent male and the Cinemascore was only a B, so it’s likely that this will be the first flop to come out of the Macfarlane camp in quite some time.
There wasn’t much in the way of new indie films coming out, and all the older titles took drops, some steep, some not. Last weekend’s winner, X-Men: Days of Future Past, dropped 64 percent and took in $32.6 million, a slight improvement over the drop the second weekend of The Last Stand had but still fairly steep for a movie with good word of mouth. The movie’s passed $500 million worldwide and will probably make at least $215 million domestically, so it’s no big deal. And Godzilla dropped another 60 percent for a weekend total of $12.2 million and an overall gross of $174 million, with a worldwide total of $374 million, over twice its production budget.
Next weekend brings Tom Cruise’s latest action extravaganza, Edge of Tomorrow.
Source: BoxOfficeMojo
