Box Office - 'Watchmen' Hits $55 Million

The pattern of activity for Watchmen this weekend was not terribly inspiring. When you put it on a chart, it represents the same kind of interest a movie like Friday the 13th shows us - big on the opening day, and it'll never approach that number again. The new comic book movie did well, but probably under expectations, debuting with $55 million. Usually, the opening weekend represents 33% of a film's overall take, but I don't think that's going to be the case here, based on the slide it took after Friday. The $25 million Friday is nice, but Box Office Mojo reports that it was off $6 million on Saturday and another $7 million on Sunday. That's a bad trend, indicating that while the film might be fairly potent a week from now (getting it to maybe $85 - $95 million), the future beyond that likely won't be that great. We predicted a $61 million opening back on Thursday, and it was on track for that much following the midnight showings Friday morning and after the overall business for that day had been tallied. But it slipped quite a bit, dropping 24 and 39% of its audience each day after that. Because it was the only game in town, that tells us that people made the decision to not see Watchmen instead of seeing something else. With a $150 million budget and probably at least another $50 - $75 million in advertising, this movie is desperately going to need foreign box office help to be a big hit. As we mentioned, there wasn't much else going on; no other movie made $10 million. The Top Five:
1 - Watchmen - $55 million
2 - Madea Goes to Jail - $8.8 million
3 - Taken - $7.5 million
4 - Slumdog Millionaire - $6.9 million
5 - Paul Blart - $4.2 million

Comments

[Orinn]

It's not a movie for everyone, it will make back it's money in DVD sales.

[Bazooka Joe]

One word;
YAAAAAWWWN!

[Asana]

I never expected Watchmen to do insanely great numbers. It's just not mainstream enough even though it falls somewhere under the superhero genre that's spawned so many flicks of late. To say "Because it was the only game in town, that tells us that people made the decision to not see Watchmen instead of seeing something else" is rather dismissive of the fact that it's an R-rated flick so it's going to get a rather limited audience right off the bat.

There's really no sense in drawing expectations or comparisons based on what other superhero flicks have done either as no others have opened with an R rating. At best, compare Watchmen's numbers to that of other R-rated releases of note and I think it would probably hold up well. Take last year's Tropic Thunder which ended off its opening week/weekend (Wed-Sun) at $37 million and the numbers for Watchmen are quite reasonable.