Box Office Weekend: Cinderella Has $70 Million Opening Ball

Sometimes, there is simply no winning against Disney and Buena Vista. The new, live action Cinderella proved a big boost to a flagging weekend box office, pulling in an estimated $70.1 million – a strong start against a $92 million budget. Nothing else even came close, with the Ed Harris/Liam Neeson thriller Run All Night opening with a rather weak $11 million estimate in comparison, and an unreported budget is not helping matters. Beyond that, things dropped below the $10 million threshold; even Kingsman: The Secret Service bumping up a place to third from last week only garnered an estimated $6.2 million. But in the end, counting worldwide gross, it is proving a decent success at the box office.

In fourth and fifth place, respectively, Focus and Chappie both pulled in about $5.8 million, and cost roughly the same to make, but by far Focus is more successful, especially when taking worldwide gross into account ($101.7 million to $56.7 million). However, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, despite an unreleased budget and an estimated $5.7 million weekend, may be profitable on its own terms, if it cost the same as the previous film ($10 million), though it certainly appears it will be much less successful ($46.4 million domestic for The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel compared to $18.1 million). Speaking of sequels, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water proved a bigger success than the original 2004 film, an estimated $4.1 million just pushing it further into success.

An estimated $3.7 million was the take for McFarland, USA, but on an unreported budget it is hard to say if it made good on a small budget or is floundering under a large one (needless to say, $35 million is still not a huge success). The same could not be said for American Sniper, which returns to the list with an estimated $2.9 million and remains the top earner of 2014, and The DUFF, whose low budget made the estimated $2.9 million it earned this weekend a nice capper to a decent $30.3 million over an $8.5 million budget.

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Seth Paul

When not failing to write novels and screenplays, box-office guru Seth writes humorous comedy tracks for films under the name "The One Man Band" that can be found at Rifftrax.com. Although, he has recently succeeded in writing the novella "Jack Alan and the Case of the Not-Exactly Rocket Scientists," available as an eBook on Amazon. He is also the English voice of Zak in "Zak McKracken: Between Time and Space."

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