Weekend Box-Office: April 1-3, 2011

Hop
has biggest opening of the year!

Despite many
of you believing that SOURCE CODE would beat HOP to the #1
spot this weekend, it was the Russell Brand-(voice)-starring
animated Easter flick that topped the charts this weekend, not
only beating out SOURCE CODE and INSIDIOUS, the two other new
releases of the week, but matching the $38M record opening for
2011, which was set by RANGO just a
few weeks ago. Needless to say, nobody would be terribly
surprised if the animated “Easter Bunny” movie kept
shoveling in the dollars until Easter rolls around at the end of
this month. Unfortunately for “Hollywood”, overall
revenues in 2011 have been 20% less than in 2010 at this
point of the year. No AVATAR or CLASH OF THE TITANS this year.

Both SOURCE CODE and INSIDIOUS
scored a rare coup on sites like Rotten
Tomatoes, which aggregate all critics’ reviews of films,
scoring higher than 60% respectively (CODE
actually scored closer to 90%), which is extremely rare for
either science-fiction or horror movies. Only time will tell if
either film will be able to keep the dollars rolling in over the
coming weeks, but neither movie cost too much on its own, so
hopefully we can consider them both to be “successful”,
so that Hollywood doesn’t stop making ORIGINAL movies every
now and then as well.

For anyone scoring at home,
it’s to note that the PG-13 version of THE KING’S SPEECH opened in
over 1,000 theaters this past weekend, but only managed about
$1,100/per theater (compared to HOP’s $10,600/per theater) and
ended up with $1.2M overall. That was enough to place it in 14th
place during this past weekend. I think it’s time to move on from
this film at this point, no?

Last week’s #2 movie, SUCKER
PUNCH — which is dividing audiences around the world including
our own MOVIE FAN
CENTRAL community (it’s average score is 6.3/10
after 18 reviews, despite a couple of members scoring it 10/10
and a couple of others scoring it 2/10) — dropped down to #7 this
weekend, with the biggest % drop of the weekend (it lost 68% of
its audience from last weekend). Last week’s #1 movie, THE DIARY
OF A WIMPY KID REVISITED, also dropped a substantial amount from
last weekend (58%), yet managed to hang around in the top 5 in
fourth place.

The 3 films to get booted from
the top 10 this week include THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU ($59M), RED
RIDING HOOD ($36M) and MARS NEEDS MOMS ($20M), which has turned
into the biggest money-loser of the year with a budget of $150M!
Wow.

Next weekend sees the release
of four more major movies including Russell Brand’s attempt at
scoring two #1 movies in a row with a remake of ARTHUR
(which between me and you, looks like shite – rent the original), SOUL
SURFER, a true-life tale about a girl surfer with a missing
arm co-starring Dennis Quaid, as well as two fun-looking movies
including HANNA,
which someone in our JoBlo.com crew has already seen and
recommended highly, as well as YOUR
HIGHNESS, a stoner medieval comedy starring Danny McBride,
James Franco and Natalie
Portman’s ass. Which film do you think will be #1 next
weekend? VOTE
HERE!!!