Throughout much of the movie Maleficent, Disney’s favorite Queen of Mean mourned the loss of her wings.
But really, who needs a pair of feathered flappers when you’ve got $70 million in box office receipts? With that kind of cash, you could hire a team of incandescent sparrows to carry you.
Malelficent, Disney’s revisionist tale of its own dastardly diva, soared to the top of the box office with that estimated $70 million payday, horning past the rest of the field and cackling occasionally at their puny efforts to catch her. Maleficent’s opening is, incidentally, nearly 10 times the $7.7 million that Disney’s original Sleeping Beauty made in 1959. (Granted, you could practically buy a whole horse for a dollar back in those ancient of days, and re-releases have boosted Sleeping Beauty’s bottom line significantly. But still.)
X-Men: Days of Future Past couldn’t slow Maleficent’s juggernaut this weekend, feebly waving a set of adamantium claws as she flew past. But the superhero movie still managed to collect another $32.6 million this week and nail down a second-place finish.
The X-Men still trounced the weekend’s other big new release, Seth McFarlane’s A Million Ways to Die in the West, which finished third with $17.1 million—or about 17 dollars per death. While rumors that the film may be relabeled A Million Ways to Die at the Box Office are completely unfounded, Box Office Mojo called the flick an unmitigated flop, noting it finished behind such notorious 2013 comedic bombs as The Dictator and The Internship.
Godzilla earned another $12.2 million—a shadow of its former gigantic box office self. But it still stomped into fourth place, just in front of Adam Sandler’s Blended ($8.4 million for fifth place).
Final figures update: 1. Maleficent, $69.4 million; 2. X-Men: Days of Future Past, $32.6 million; 3. A Million Ways to Die in the West, $16.8 million; 4. Godzilla, $12 million; 5. Blended, $8.1 million.
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