February 10-12, 2012 Box Office Results

Weekend of February 10-12, 2012

The Vow – $38,000,000 estimate – My prediction: Under – $41,202,458 actual – Over
Safe House – $30,000,000 estimate – My prediction: Under – $40,172,720 actual – Over
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace 3D – $19,000,000 estimate – My prediction: Over – $22,469,932 actual – Over
Journey 2: The Mysterious Island – $18,000,000 estimate – My prediction: Under – $27,335,363 actual – Over

What in the world made the box office blow up this weekend!?!? For only the second time in history, four opening films earned over $20 million in the same weekend. Incredible! Obviously none of us saw this coming and so no one got all their guesses correct.

The Vow had the third highest opening for a romantic film ever. You can attribute marketing to the success as they really promoted the "based on a true story" thing along with making it look like every other Nicholas Sparks film. That, and there really haven’t been any solid films for women or date night audiences lately. 72% of the audience were women.

I was shocked to see how busy Safe House was. When I was getting tickets for Star Wars, four people were behind me in line waiting to get refunds because they couldn’t find open seating for Safe House. I was in disbelief, but the weekend numbers certainly reflect that. With all the films Denzel Washington has been in, can you believe that this was his second-highest debut ever? I guess people are not tired of seeing Denzel continue to do the whole tough guy, know-it-all, "King Kong ain’t got nothing on me" stuff.

The biggest surprise was Journey 2’s opening weekend. It made more than the original Journey to the Center of the Earth and that had a summer release! Many agree with me on thinking that it mostly has to do with The Rock starring, especially when you compare it to the original’s Brendan Fraser. Look at how well Fast Five did with The Rock’s addition and I’m sure we’ll see some great numbers for the G.I. Joe sequel due out this summer that he is also in. It also helped that the film was in 3D in many locations as it accounted for 74% of ticket sales.

Like I’ve said before, you can never really count Star Wars out. Even arguably the least appreciated film in the saga saw some fine returns that brought it up to the fifth highest grossing film of all-time. That’s up from seventh, passing E.T. and Shrek 2. 20th Century Fox was only expecting a $20 mil debut for Episode I, so they are probably satisfied with the opening numbers. People, like myself, wanted to see the movie on the big screen again and see how the 3D conversion was. Personally, the 3D was meh, but seeing the big picture and hearing the amazing audio work on a nice, loud surround system really made it worth it for me. It was also the first full experience of Star Wars for my daughter and she loved the movie. It was so fun to watch her get to the edge of her seat during some of the action pieces. The Phantom Menace is currently at $967.2 million worldwide and is expected to pass $1 billion during its re-release run. Episode II in 3D will most likely see a 2013 release.

Alright, so we have one movie with sneak previews on Tuesday, Valentine’s Day and that is This Means War. By Friday, it should see about 3,100 theatres. Anyone else think this looks atrocious? It was supposed to be released as Spy vs. Spy under the same rights of the comics in MAD Magazine, but I heard that those right were lost due to unknown reasons. Perhaps the authors of the series did not care for the McG directed film, but I’m only speculating. One thing that is going to hurt it at the box office is that the movie is rated R. Ghost Rider 2 will come out on Friday in about 3,000 theatres. No idea why they decided to make a second one. And finally, The Secret World of Arrietty will get its U.S. release. Known as “The Borrower Arrietty” in Japan, we are finally getting this movie 19 months after its premiere on the other side of the Pacific. The Studio Ghibli film which was written and produced by Hayao Miyazaki, but not directed by, should see a decent release since it’s based off of The Borrowers, an English book that children still read in schools today. Disney has done a good job marketing this one out, especially on The Disney Channel. The distribution rights around Studio Ghibli films is quite odd as this film has been dubbed in English twice now. Once for UK audiences with Saoirse Ronan, Mark Strong, and Olivia Colman leading and then again for us in the States with Bridgit Mendler, Will Arnett, and Amy Poehler. It feels like a waste of time a resources to dub it twice, but whatever, I don’t know the situation.