Box Office Weekend: Ender’s Game Starts November with a Minor Victory

The new sci-fi action adventure Ender’s Game took first place at the box office to begin November, but its estimated $28 million was not exactly a rousing start to financial success, despite it getting fairly positive reviews. This week’s second-place finisher, Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa (an estimated $20.5 million) had a better opening weekend, and had already made back its costs and then some ($62.1 million against a $15 million budget). Costing around $110 million, Ender’s Game needs a much stronger showing in the weeks to come both here and overseas to make its investment worthwhile, critical acclaim or not.

Last Vegas and Free Birds snagged the third- and fourth-place spots, respectively, with an estimated $16.5 million and $16.2 million, also respectively. Neither film is sitting well with critics, with Last Vegas and its veteran cast being remarked as a Hangover-style film for older viewers, and Free Birds as a simplistic goofball animated film that will entertain kids and no one else. Whether those criticisms will hold true for audiences, neither film has made much of a dent at the box office, and both fell well short of their production costs. Last Vegas is in better shape, having cost half as much as Free Birds, but both films remain in the tank; thankfully for CBS and Relativity media, however, neither has misfired as badly as the high profile Machete Kills or The Fifth Estate, neither of which have made $10 million in total.

Gravity continues on a slow, graceful decline, its estimated $13.1 million banking nicely in its $219.2 million domestic take, as does Captain Phillips, which, with an estimated $8.5 million, is not quite the winner that Gravity is, but it still managed to pull out a winner with $82.6 million in domestic earnings.

In seventh, 12 Year a Slave continues to be impressive in its limited release, scoring an estimated $4.6 million for its biggest weekend yet, its weekend gross accounting for over half the money it has made so far. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 also had itself a quiet but productive weekend with an estimated $4.2 million. While it is unlikely to make as much as the previous film, it has so far proven to be more profitable thanks to its smaller budget, and it held up well against the first competition it has had for the family market in weeks (in the form of Free Birds).

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Finally, Carrie managed to squeak across into the black with an estimated $3.4 million weekend, giving the remake the chance to avoid bomb status. The same could not be said for The Counselor, as the similarly poorly received thriller based on the story by Cormac McCarthy failed to impress audiences any more than critics as it made an estimated $3.3 million, leaving it far and away from its $25 million costs.

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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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