CinemaNerdz

Weekend Box-Office: The Hunger Games Not On Top for the First Time Ever!

Seth Paul

Now, don’t let the title here mislead you…The Hunger Games is not out of the running just yet. Instead, the epic moneymaker settled for bronze in its fifth week in the box office with an estimated $14.5 million, about half of the take the #1 spot earned, Think Like a Man. The romantic comedy based on the book by comedian Steve Harvey made an estimated $33 million, winning out over the romantic drama The Lucky One. Also based on a book (by notable tear-jerking expert Nicholas Sparks) and starring Zac Efron, The Lucky One pulled in an impressive $22.8 million estimate. With reported budgets of $12 million and $25 million for Think Like a Man and The Lucky One respectively, both certainly had good weekends when it comes to the bottom line, even though critics are not exactly singing each film’s praises. The Hunger Games, meanwhile, is still the film of the year in terms of earnings, with a domestic draw of $356.9 million. Whether it will stand up during the summer blockbuster season (especially against big name fare such as The Avengers) remains to be seen.

One other debut made the list, Disneynature’s Chimpanzee. Following the life of an abandoned infant chimp and the chimpanzee who adopts him, the documentary made an estimated $10.2 million. With an unreported budget it is hard to say if the movie was profitable, but it seems possible; its debut weekend is the highest earning opener of any nature documentary film to date, and critics have touted it much more highly than fifth-place finisher The Three Stooges. While there is potential for a joke to be made about chimps doing better at the box office than three goofballs (The Three Stooges came in with an estimated $9.2 million), the real story is the critically and audience praised The Cabin in the Woods not doing as well as either film, earning an estimated $7.8 million and $27 million in total gross. While neither film will be a box office bomb if the budget numbers are to be believed, it could very well be the PG-rated comedy might just be able to attract a larger audience on the basis of its content than the R-rated horror comedy could.

American Reunion pulled a bit of a coup, edging out the 3D re-release of Titanic by a small amount (an estimated $5.2 million to Titanic’s estimated $5 million), putting the R-rated comedy just shy of domestic success. 21 Jump Street, already a major success, slides down the list to ninth and an estimated $4.6 million, while Mirror Mirror continues to stall out on the domestic front, earning an estimated $4.1 million. Director Tarsem cannot seem to relocate the success he found in last year’s The Immortals, which scored well both here and overseas, while Mirror Mirror needs that foreign green to get itself on solid footing (domestic totals of $55.2 million, worldwide gross of $119.2 million on an $85 million budget).

Weekend Box-Office (April 20th – April 22nd)

  1. Think Like a Man…$33 million
  2. The Lucky One…$22.8 million
  3. The Hunger Games…$14.5 million
  4. Chimpanzee…$10.2 million
  5. The Three Stooges…$9.2 million
  6. The Cabin in the Woods…$7.8 million
  7. American Reunion…$5.2 million
  8. Titanic 3D…$5 million
  9. 21 Jump Street…$4.6 million
  10. Mirror Mirror…$4.1 million

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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