February is generally thought of as a cinematic wasteland—a month when studios dump their creative dregs on desperate audiences. But The LEGO Movie is proving that any bleak landscape can be gussied up with a lot of colorful, plastic bricks.
Yes, everything is still awesome in the world of LEGOs. Piling on its week-one win, The LEGO Movie lost less than 30% of its audience and earn an estimated $48.8 million—enough, presumably, to buy a life-size LEGO model of the Death Star, complete with garbage masher and brown-brick tentacle monster. In two weeks, Emmett and his lemon-yellow pals have earned $129.1 million, sprinting to the early lead for 2014. It’s also earning oodles of acclaim, and not just from us. The site rottentomatoes.com gives The LEGO Movie a 96% freshness rating, suggesting that the flick has a lot of support to, um, build on.
The LEGO Movie held off scads of passionate Valentines’ Day newcomers, including Kevin Hart’s About Last Night. The raunchy comedy (which our reviewer Bob Hoose thought was pretty abysmal) was the highest newcomer on the charts but still finished a distant second with $27 million. (Incidentally, Hart nearly had two films in the Top 5: His January flick Ride Along finished sixth with $8.8 million.)
About Last Night, a remake of a 1986 film, was one of a bevy of 1980s retreads this week: Clearly, studios believe audiences just can’t get enough of Reagan-era movies. But alas, audiences proved them wrong. RoboCop, a PG-13 reboot of the 1987 R-rated sci-fi thriller, finished third with $21.5 million. And the PG-13 Endless Love, which remade the tawdry1981 Brooke Shields swooner, wound up in fifth place with $13.4 million—trailing fourth-place The Monuments Men by more than $1.6 million.
But all these remakes did significantly better than Winter’s Tale, the weekend’s fourth wide release. That fantastical romance starring Colin Farrell—one that you’d think would’ve been perfect cold-weather Valentine’s Day fodder—was left out in the cold by the competition, earning just $7.8 million.
‘Course, it did manage to beat out Disney’s Frozen which, after 13 weeks in the Top Five, finally slid to No. 8 and a frosty $5.9 million. Since its release in the waning days of 2013, Frozen has earned more than $376 in North America and almost $1 billion worldwide. Now that’s some serious ice.
Final figures update: 1. The LEGO Movie, $49.8 million; 2. About Last Night, $25.6 million; 3. RoboCop, $21.7 million; 4. The Monuments Men, $15.5 million; 5. Endless Love, $13.3 million.
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