Box Office - 'Alice' Rules, 'Bounty Hunter' Disappoints

In seventeen days, Alice in Wonderland has made about $265 million in the US, over half a billion worldwide. This frame was the sixth most lucrative third weekend ever, as $34 million more rolled into its coffers to help make $350 million a conceivable number - the most ever for a movie released in March - and the global ticket sales should make it one of Disney's biggest movies ever in terms of raw, unadjusted revenue. It received little resistance from three new movies, even though two of them exceeded $20 million at the box office. One of those, the second place finisher Diary of a Wimpy Kid was a surprise. The other, The Bounty Hunter, was supposed to make over $20 million, but probably a little more than it did. For Bounty Hunter, the numbers aren't terrible. Yet. It doesn't strike me as following the average movie blueprint, making about 30 - 35% of its box office total in the opening weekend. If it does, it's only because there's nothing playing in the adult comedy/romantic comedy/action comedy sandbox until Date Night, but I expect it to fall rather quickly, finishing with around $50 million or so. That's just enough to break even, but of course, studios aren't in the business of breaking even. The news just keeps getting worse for Universal, which had Repo Men this week on the heels of the disappointing Green Zone. A few years ago, it was Paramount that couldn't buy a hit, and now it's Uni, which has had three high-profile failures in 2010 following up a 2009 that included such bombs as Land of the Lost, Funny People, Duplicity, State of Play, Love Happens, and Cirque du Freak, along with movies that should have made more than they did, like Bruno, Public Enemies, Drag Me to Hell, and The Fourth Kind. The studio's only hits in the past 18 months are Fast and Furious, It's Complicated, and Couples Retreat, and only Fast and Furious has tripled its production budget. It's also the only movie Universal has made since Mamma Mia! that drew over $300 million in worldwide receipts. That trend may slow this summer with Robin Hood and maybe Despicable Me, but there's no mammoth film on the horizon for Universal until Little Fockers in December, but even that has such high salaries (about $60 million for Stiller, De Niro, and Wilson alone) that the potential profit margins are already being cut into. It looks as though Avatar will exceed $750 million, but it's crawling at this point, earning under $4 million this weekend to take its total to $736 million in the US. What Universal wouldn't give for a movie that made one-third of that amount. The Top Five:
1 - Alice in Wonderland ($34.5 million)
2 - Diary of a Wimpy Kid ($21.8 million)
3 - The Bounty Hunter ($20.5 million)
4 - Repo Men ($6.1 million)
5 - She's Out of My League ($6 million)

Comments

[Vince]

We talked about how horrible Universal was doing last week, Colin, so this week I'll just talk about the real box office story- Diary of a Wimpy Kid's success. I keep forgetting that the book series is mad popular with children- it's not Harry Potter popular or anything, but it has a solid following. That movie's going to at least quadruple its small budget, which is a rare thing for any big-budget movie these days. Oh and I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the film will be getting a sequel.

[Get The Big Picture]

No limb; Fox has been working on it already.

[MRPigg]

I'm not surprised at Wimpy Kid's success. The books are crazy popular and the kids who want to see the movie don't care about the terrible reviews. My ten-year-old loved it.

Alice also becomes the 100th film in U.S. history to eclipse $200 million. Heh, remember when $100 million was the magic number for a smash hit?