Now You See Me *Cheesy Puns In Its Debut; Fast & Furious *Cheesy Puns To First
From Box Office Mojo
Now You See Me *made magic over the weekend by grossing well over its expected return.
Despite that surprise, and a steep 65% drop from Memorial Day weekend, Fast & Furious 6 avoided *spinning out by managing to remain in first place.
The Smith Family sci-fi home video After Earth rightfully came in third with a take on par with recent genre stinkers.
1. Fast & Furious 6
It looks like the majority of people who were going to see FF6 did so last week as the automotive caper sank to a weekend gross of $34M.
Don’t cry for Vin Diesel just yet because with a worldwide total of $480M, FF6 is on pace to (sigh) speed past its predecessors’ total with relative ease.
Given the trend of each successive Fast & Furious sequel out-grossing the previous one, I’ve already got my headline for the seventh installment cued up:
“Fastest Fast 7 Vroom Pew Pew 7 Kaboom Crossed The Finish Line First This Weekend”
2. Now You See Me
With a Tomatometer score of 44% and the fact that Americans tend to ignore films based on illusions or magicians, Now You See Me’s $28M was a surprise to everyone.
That being said, with a production budget of $75M (before P&A) and a slate of high profile releases approaching, its going to be interesting to see if NYSM can make its money back.
Unrelated true story, my wife and I were having dinner the other day and a gentleman came up to our table holding a wallet.
He asked if I had dropped mine by chance.
As I was checking to see if I had, he said, “wait, no, this looks like mine” and pulled a deck of cards out of his pocket. Both my wife and I looked at each other with “sonofabitch” in our eyes. We had to sit through ten minutes of card tricks. Well played table magician.
Let that be a lesson to the beginning illusionists out there. Like all decent people who don’t want to be bothered while we’re eating, we’re going to say no. Your best trick is not letting us do that.
I didn’t see either Fast & Furious 6 or Now You See Me but I hope that America enjoyed watching them as much as I enjoyed skipping them.
3. After Earth
Scratch that. I would’ve happily sat through both FF6 and NYSM instead of this stillborn effort from the loins of Will Smith and the butt of M. Night Shyamalan.
Thankfully this turd is all but flushed with a meek $27M opening.
We get into the ins-and-outs of its ineptitude on tomorrow’s F&N Podcast so I’ll be brief here and say that $27M is still way too much.
4/5. Star Trek Into Darkness & Epic
Star Trek Into Darkness fell to 4th and 5th place this weekend in a dead-heat with the low-key animated flick Epic. Both took in an estimated $16.4M.
At this point, STID not only trails the 2009 entry, but looks like it could finish below it when all is said and done.
There isn’t much time to match the first one’s $257M domestic total but its possible, unlikely but possible that the foreign market will save the day. I’m having a hard time explaining this as anything other than a marketing blunder. Or maybe global warming.
I don’t know or care about Epic but if you saw it last weekend and enjoyed it, you had a better time at the theater than I did.
Don’t get cocky kid.