Box Office Weekend: Focus In the Lead, But Not Very Energetic

It is a slow week for new releases. After the smash opening weekend of Fifty Shades of Grey, the box office took a nose dive as Will Smith and his con artist comedy/drama Focus opened in first place with a fairly tepid estimated $19.1 million, a rough start to the $50 million budgeted film. In second, Kingsman: The Secret Service finds it has settled comfortably in second place for the third week in a row, earning an estimated $11.8 million. Counting its worldwide take, it has managed to pull itself into decent financial footing, while it is no match for The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, whose estimated $11.2 million puts it at nearly double its costs in domestic earnings alone, and Fifty Shades of Grey, whose worldwide $486.2 million (and estimated $10.9 million weekend) practically guarantees the rest of the franchise will follow, regardless of critical reception.

The Lazarus Effect would have had a rough opening with an estimated $10.6 million if it had been produced by anyone else, but the people behind The Purge franchise remain dedicated to low budgets regardless of critical reception, and its $3.3 million price tag has already ensured a profitable release. McFarland, USA, on the other hand, with an estimated $7.8 million, still has not reported a budget cost, though compared to other sports films released by Buena Vista through the years, it sits somewhere on the low side of average in terms of box office performance. In a stunning display, things are looking up for the already well-received American Sniper…besides an Oscar win and an estimated $7.7 million, it also looks poised to overtake both Guardians of the Galaxy and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 for highest grossing domestic release of 2014, if it can hold up for at least two more weeks.

At the bottom, The DUFF proved fairly resilient, picking up an estimated $7.2 million and a profitable $20.1 million in domestic gross. Still Alice, starring Julianne Moore as an Alzheimer’s-diagnosed linguistics professor, picked up over 500 theaters and a place on the top ten after seven weeks of release, earning an estimated $2.7 million and pushing the $5 million budgeted production into minor profits. However, Hot Tub Time Machine 2 seemed doomed from the start and did not disappoint, with an estimated $2.4 million only providing $10.2 million in total earnings to the $14 million production before it likely drops from the list.

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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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