Weekend Box-Office: March 18-20, 2011

Part
of the ‘Wolf Pack’ gets #1…

A pretty boring weekend at the
box-office. Despite LIMITLESS opening in 1st place with close to
$20M, the other 2 new releases of the weekend, THE LINCOLN LAWYER
and PAUL, opened in 4th and 5th place respectively while last
weekend’s #1 movie, BATTLE: LOS ANGELES, dropped 60% of its
audience from a week ago, and down-shifted into 3rd place, still
ahead of the two newcomers. All three new movies were receiving
solid CinemaScore feedback from viewers though, with LIMITLESS and
PAUL scoring a B+, while THE LINCOLN LAWYER was being lapped up
with a score of A-.

RANGO seems to be the film
that many are talking about these days, maintaining its 2nd place
spot from last weekend, while increasing its overall total to $93M
in its third weekend of release. The other topic that seems to
have Hollywood buzzing, is the lack of young people going to
movies these days. Over 70% of the LIMITLESS audience was over the
age of 25, according to Yahoo
Movies. Over 94% of the audience for THE LINCOLN LAWYER was
over the age of 25 (that’s what you get when you put a non-shirtless
McConaughey as the lead in a film), while even the fanboy-oriented
PAUL featured an audience of 60% that was made up of 25-year-olds
and over.

MARS NEEDS MOMS seems to be the
"bomb" of the season, grossing only $15M domestically,
and only another $23M internationally. I can’t imagine that will
pay the $150M bill that it cost to produce the film. Yipes!

THE KING’S SPEECH was finally
removed from the top 10 this weekend, in only its 17th week of
release…nice! The film ended up with about $133M, despite
starting off slow and in limited release. Just goes to show what a
stuttering king can do for the box-office! GNOMEO & JULIET was
also knocked from the top 10 this weekend, with a very respectable
$94M in grosses (although we don’t really know how much it cost),
while Adam Sandler’s latest "comedy", JUST GO WITH IT,
ended up with $98M, which was Sandler’s lowest overall box-office
comedy gross since 2000’s LITTLE NICKY with $39M (although I
suppose you can consider 2009’s FUNNY PEOPLE a "comedy"
as well — that film only grossed $52M).

Next week sees the release of
only 2 "big movies", the first of which is a sequel to
last year’s surprise-hit DIARY OF A WIMPY KID which cost $15M to
make, while grossing $64M overall. This year’s follow-up (wow,
they wrote it up pretty fast, eh?) is entitled DIARY
OF A WIMPY KID: RODRICK RULES and stars nobody we know or
really care about. The other film being released is Zack Snyder’s SUCKER
PUNCH, which we’re very excited about (we’re giving away free
swag HERE)
since it comes from a great director, looks like a ton of fun and
features hot chicks kicking ass. Yes, please! So how much $$$ do
you think SUCKER PUNCH will open with next weekend? VOTE
HERE!!!