Did you go to a movie this weekend? I thought not.
Not very many people did. The top 12 movies earned a grand total of $51.9 million this weekend: Given rising ticket prices, that equates to just 276 attendees nationwide (according to a rather disheveled box office expert I found loitering outside my cubicle). And you have to wonder whether some of those attendees just got lost on the way to the bathroom or something.
Box Office Mojo tells us that it’s the worst money-making weekend since 2008—those long-ago days before any of us had even heard of an “iPad”—and if you count inflation, we might not have seen a weekend this dowdy since Charlie Chaplin was in his prime. It’s telling that Raiders of the Lost Ark—a thirty-something movie given a special 267-screen IMAX re-release—earned more than $1.7 million and finished 14th this week. 14th! As Indiana Jones himself might say, it’s not the years that makes something feel old, it’s the mileage. And 31 years old or not, it seems that Raiders is purring along nicely.
But no matter how dismal the box office tallies might be, we still need to declare a winner, and that winner is The Possession. I know, I know … weird to think how a quiet little horror film could claim the crown for two weeks in a row. Some might even wonder whether there’d be something in the box office bylines that would prohibit such a thing. But if you look at the footnotes closely you would find that, actually, Possession is nine-tenths of the law.
OK, that was lame, but look what I have to work with. Cut me some slack.
Another holdover, Lawless, made $6 million to hold onto second place. In third came The Words, a nice and artsy little film, suffered a not-quite Oogieloves-type immolation this week by collecting just $5 million for third place. I can’t help but wonder whether moviegoers took the title at its (ahem) word, and assumed that Bradley Cooper, Dennis Quaid and Jeremy Irons were just reading from their favorite sections in the dictionary.
The Expendables 2 ($4.8 million) and The Bourne Legacy ($4 million) finished fourth and fifth, respectively.
On a sidenote, it’d be great to see the folks behind The Words and The Expendables team up for a joint sequel titled The Expendable Words. It might be a biopic of this blog. With more gunfire, of course.
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