First look: ‘Losers’ flops, ‘Back-Up Plan’ soft, ‘Kick-Ass’ doesn’t hold up
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‘How to Train Your Dragon’ topped the box-office charts on a slow weekend at theaters as a pair of new pictures failed to light up moviegoers and ‘Kick-Ass’ didn’t show much strength in its second round.
Comic-book adaptation ‘The Losers,’ financed by producer Joel Silver’s Dark Castle Entertainment, lived up to its name, selling an anemic $9.6 million in tickets in the U.S. and Canada, according to an estimate from distributor Warner Bros. That’s slightly below already-modest expectations for the poorly reviewed action film.
It’s the third disappointment for Dark Castle, which produces genre pictures for less than $40 million, since it started funding movies instead of just producing them. 2008’s ‘RocknRolla’ and 2009’s ‘Whiteout’ were both flops, though last year’s horror film ‘The Orphan’ was a modest success.
Jennifer Lopez’s romantic comedy ‘The Back-Up Plan’ opened to a soft but not disastrous $12.25 million. The second release from CBS Films started far better than its first, the flop ‘Extraordinary Measures,’ and should hold up well in the coming weeks if it performs like other romantic comedies.
‘The Back-Up Plan,’ which cost about $35 million to make, opened below several other Lopez films in the same genre, such as 2001’s ‘The Wedding Planner’ and 2002’s ‘Maid in Manhattan,’ despite years of ticket-price inflation, though both of those had bigger-name male costars.
Lionsgate executives predicted after last week’s disappointing start for ‘Kick-Ass’ that ticket sales for the high-octane superhero movie would decline modestly. Those hopes were dashed this weekend as its gross fell a very average 52% to $9.5 million.
Last weekend’s other new movie, the family comedy ‘Death at a Funeral,’ also had a typical drop, declining 51% to $8 million.
After just missing out on the No. 1 spot on the box-office chart last weekend, DreamWorks Animation’s ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ easily claimed it this weekend as ticket sales fell 23% to $15 million. Its domestic total after five weeks is a healthy $178 million.
Walt Disney Studios’ DisneyNature division opened the documentary ‘Oceans’ at just 1,206 theaters, fewer than half as many as ‘The Losers’ and ‘The Back-Up Plan,’ to $6 million.
(For more analysis of the slowest box office weekend of the year, see our follow-up post.)
-- Ben Fritz
Top photo: Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Idris Elba in ‘The Losers.’ Credit: John Bramley / Warner Bros.