There weren’t any surprises last weekend with The Possession scoring an easy win against little to no competition. Lawless came in 2nd while The Expendables 2 was a close 3rd.
The Possession, a horror produced by master of the genre Sam Raimi, made a very impressive $21 million over the long Labor Day weekend. That actually ranks as the 2nd highest opening of all time over Labor Day Weekend (Halloween got $30.6 million in 2007). But most importantly, The Possession managed to match its $14 million production budget in just 3 days, something we don’t see all that often in this era of $200 million blockbusters. So congrats to Lionsgate on a 3rd consecutive #1 spot at the box office.
Lawless was not so impressive with just $12.8 million over the long 4-day weekend. That puts the crime drama at $15 million after 6 days. Unfortunately I don’t have any data regarding this film’s budget but as soon as I get a number, I’ll be sure to break it apart. Either way I doubt this will be a profitable film for The Weinstein Company.
In 3rd place The Expendables 2 had a solid weekend with $14.4 million, down 14.7%, although keep in mind I’m talking about the longer 4-day weekend here, so that percentage is not as great as it might seem. Take The Dark Knight Rises for example, in 7th place the film was up 10.7% with almost $8 million and a total of $433.3 million right now. Back to The Expendables 2, the action extravaganza has $68.8 million after 18 days, considerably less than the $82.9 million of its predecessor. Based on those numbers The Expendables 2 might be looking at a total of around $85 million at the ends of its box office run in North America.
The Bourne Legacy was 4th with $9.3 million and $98.3 million thus far (pretty good legs) while ParaNorman rounded out the top 5 thanks to $8.9 million, a gross that brings the stop-motion animation to $40.4 million.
Oogieloves In the Big Balloon Adventure, the 3rd and last wide release of the weekend, can be found all the way down in 26th place. Yes people, a film which opened in 2160 theaters couldn’t even break the top 20. Over the long Labor Day weekend, this nonsense grabbed $0.6 million, but the real doozy here comes courtesy of its normal, 3-day weekend. With just $0.4 million, Oogieloves now holds the record of worst very wide (2000+ theaters) opening weekend of all time, a feat many thought impossible to achieve after the animation Delgo scored a never-before-seen $0.5 million opening weekend back in 2008.
So in the end history repeats itself. In 2008 we had The Dark Knight break the highest opening weekend record while Delgo got the worst one. In 2012 The Avengers scores a new opening record while Oogieloves In the Big Balloon Adventure achieves the opposite.
