The Easter weekend has come and gone, and with it are three days of time with families which can either mean lower or higher box office than normal for mid-April. In this case, it was a fairly low-grossing weekend for the top 10, and only one of this week’s new releases managed to find success. In first and second place was the exact same first and second from last weekend – Captain America: The Winter Soldier took the top spot for the third weekend in a row with $26.6 million, bringing it to a $201 million total in the U.S., and Rio 2 took second place with $22.5 million, bringing it to $75 million overall. It’s likely that these two will hold their positions next weekend and get knocked off at the beginning of May when summer movie season rolls around – next week sees The Other Woman and The Quiet Ones, neither of which seem likely to do boffo box office.
Of this week’s new releases, the clear winner was Heaven Is For Real, the movie about the little boy who visits heaven and is conveniently the son of Pastor Greg Kinnear. Along with getting the rare A+ from Cinemascore, a grade more likely attributed to the types of people seeing a movie called Heaven Is For Real, the movie made $21.5 million over the weekend and an additional $7 million since its opening on Wednesday, putting it well ahead of its $12 million budget. It remains to be seen whether the high weekend gross was because of the Easter weekend or if the film will have the legs of its counterpart, God’s Not Dead.
The rest of the weekend’s new releases were pretty much DOA. The directing debut of cinematographer Wally Pfister, Transcendence, rode into theaters on bad reviews and a weirdo premise and eked out $11.1 million for the weekend, far below its $100 million budget and likely to be the year’s first big budget flop. The spoof sequel that no one asked for, the Marlon Wayans-fronted A Haunted House 2, opened in fifth with $9.1 million, about half of what its predecessor racked up a year ago (though its $3 million budget means anything will make the film money). And while Disney Nature documentaries usually don’t burn up the box office (why pay to see something you get at home for free?), the John C. Reilly-narrated Bears was their lowest opened to date, in 11th place with $4.7 million.
Source: BoxOfficeMojo
