They say that the days of the internal combustion engine are numbered. Someday we’ll all toodle around in one-seat, 50-pound cars that run solely on happy thoughts. Someday we’ll all look back at the age of high-octane muscle cars as days of wasteful excess and unimaginable engine noise.
But that “someday” isn’t here yet. This is America—land of baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and tricked-out 1967 Chevy Camaros. You can pry our fuel injectors out of our cold, dead hands.
Want proof? The ongoing popularity of Fast & Furious 6 will serve for starters.
After peeling out of the gate last week with a turbocharged $97.4 million open, Fast throttled back a bit this weekend, losing nearly 65% of its audience and collecting an estimated $34.5 million. Still, that was enough to take the checkered flag, holding off two would-be challengers in Now You See Me and After Earth. I’m assuming that the folks who run the show at Universal Studios are quaffing a celebratory glass of milk right about now.
But it wasn’t just gasoline that powered the weekend’s box office: It was adrenaline. You won’t see any deep dramas or light romcoms in the Top 5—not in the heart of the summer movie season. The multiplex this week was all about action, action, action.
Now You See Me, an uneven but inventive caper starring Jesse Eisenberg and Mark Ruffalo, conjured up a surprise second-place finish and $28.1 million, narrowly edging Will and Jaden Smith’s sci-fi offering of After Earth for runner-up honors.
After Earth’s own future looked positively dystopian in light of its $27 million, third-place finish. Some prognosticators felt that After Earth was Fast’s most formidable challenger. Now, people are talking about it in the same breath as colossal bombs like John Carter. Not too promising.
Star Trek: Into Darkness and the animated adventure Epic are, as far as the week’s early estimates go, neck-and-neck for a fourth-place finish. Each is estimated to have pocketed $16.4 million, so we’ll just have to wait later on this afternoon, after the accountants finish tabulating nickles, to see which one has the most juice: the Enterprise or those cute little hummingbirds.
Final figures update: 1. Fast & Furious 6, $35.2 million; 2. Now You See Me, $29.3 million; 3. After Earth, $27.5 million; 4. Star Trek: Into Darkness, $16.8 million; 5. Epic, $16.6 million.
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