Sunday, June 19, 2011

Box Office Round Up: ...In Flopest Night



Ryan Reynolds's 3D abs weren't enough to save Green Lantern. Despite a gigantic budget -- rumors at first said $300 million, and now that is actually looking to be close to the truth -- Green Lantern only came home with $52.6 million. That puts the opening less than Thor or X-Men...or Daredevil or Ghost Rider or the Hulk or either Fantastic Four or even Batman and Robin in terms of tickets sold. It also so far has made a near non-existent $17 million foreign gross. Thor made that much in Brazil alone.

The movie is also rubbing people the wrong way. In addition to all the bad reviews, people are upset that the credits never mention original Green Lantern creators Marty Nodell or Bill Finger, nor do they mention the legendary writer/artist duo of John Broome and Gil Kane, who created Hal Jordan, Sinestro, Carol Ferris, Tomar Re, Abin Sur, Hector Hammond, Guy Gardner, and pretty much wrote the screenplay before the movie existed. Keep in mind, this was made by Warner Bros, the parent company of DC Comics. And finally, to add insult to injury, after the credits they show an ad promoting DC's comics with a link to some digital issues. They spelled the URL wrong.

And I almost forgot the best part. WB's explanation on the low success? The audience was getting it confused with the Green Hornet. Really, that was their excuse.

The craziest thing, Green Lantern was the only successful opening this weekend. Jim Carrey's Mr. Popper's Penguins came in at third with $18 million, which is an even worse opening than that God-awful Yes Man. This would be news, but looking back Carrey only had two box office smashes (Bruce Almighty and the Grinch). The real news here is that someone thought it was a smart idea to release a penguin movie in June.

The craziest thing, Mr. Popper's Penguins was not the biggest bust of the weekend. That honor belongs to The Art of Getting By. Yes, it did not have that wide of release, but even playing in over 600 theaters (GL had 3800) it made a mere $700,000. That is $1148 per screen (GL had $13,806). Even Fast Five and Rio did better than that. Heck, Buck which opened on a whopping 4 screens made $64,000, or $16,000 a screen. And Art actually was running alot of commercials too.

Atleast Super 8 is still going good, at #2 with $21 million. It has now made 150% of its budget.

Good word of mouth isn't helping X-Men First Class in the least. It was #4 with $11.5 million and $120m life to date. It is still $40m away from matching its domestic budget, and from catching  X-Men 1, the lowest grossing X-film until now.

12 comments:

  1. Actually made more money than I thought it would.

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  2. penguins in june sound cool to me.

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  3. Wow, that is unreal! It sounds like movies in general are down this year.

    xx

    http://www.trufflesnruffles.com/

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  4. Yea, 52 is nothing to brush off imo, i really thought it'd do worse, im talking 25-40 range.

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  5. Damnn i was thinking it might be up there with spiderman!

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  6. Well, initially, I confused this movie with Green Hornet. Not much of a Green Lantern fan anyways.

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  7. Here's to terrible comic book movies you knew were bad before they were released!

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  8. Hey, I also though this was like the green hornet!

    You can visit my blog here.

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  9. Is the superhero movie bubble bursting ?

    Seem like all those summer comic book movie have not meet the expectation.

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