Weekend Box Office Report: January 30-February 1 2015

By Kip Mooney • On • In News News 0

 BOX OFFICE REPORT 

January 30-February 1, 2015(estimates from BoxOfficeMojo.com)

TOP 51. American Sniper (31.8 million)2. Paddington ($8.5 million)3. Project Almanac ($8.5 million)4. Black or White ($6.4 million)5. The Boy Next Door ($6.0 million)

In its third unstoppable week, American Sniper shot down all the competition with a whopping $31.8 million. That's likely the biggest Super Bowl weekend ever. The controversial film about Chris Kyle has made nearly $250 million already, just a hair shy of the final Hobbit movie. The biggest of the Best Picture nominees still has a shot at $300 million, and will end up as the third highest-grossing movie of 2014, behind Mockingjay and Guardians of the Galaxy. Pretty impressive for a movie not based on a comic book.

To put in perspective how little audiences were interested in any of the other movies this weekend, Paddington, in its third weekend, moved back up to No. 2, taking in around $8.5 million. It may still end up below found-footage time-travel movie Project Almanac, which is dead even with it.

Both made more than Mike Binder's race drama Black or White which stars Kevin Costner and Octavia Spencer as characters caught in a custody battle. Jennifer Lopez's sultry thriller The Boy Next Door only made $6 million in its second weekend. Fortunately it only cost $4 million, so this little potboiler has turned a tidy profit for Universal. 

Outside the top 5: - This Weekend's Indie Champ: Timbuktu, Mauritania's nominee for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The real-life drama about opposition to a violent coup averaged $12,500 on four screens.

- The Game of Thrones IMAX event, which paired the last two episodes of Season Four with a special trailer for Season Five, earned $1.5 million on just 205 screens. That's even more than Johnny Depp's Mortdecai did in its second weekend. Ouch.

- In another case of an overeager studio expanding too quickly, Kevin MacDonald's submarine thriller Black Sea added more than 300 screens, but only managed to average a mediocre $1,482 per screen.

Next week: Three more new releases look to knock American Sniper from its perch, but none of them look poised to do it. The Wachowskis' sci-fi epic Jupiter Ascending got bumped from last summer, but it's complicated mythology makes it difficult to advertise. Seventh Son got bumped from January 2013, but this medieval adventure could be Julianne Moore's Norbit. And finally there's a new SpongeBob SquarePants movie, but for some reason it's a CGI-live action monstrosity. Let's say the best anyone can hope for is $15 million, which will still be less than what American Sniper does in its 4th weekend of wide release.

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About Kip Mooney

Kip Mooney
Like many film critics born during and after the 1980s, my hero is Roger Ebert. The man was already the best critic in the nation when he won the Pulitzer in 1975, but his indomitable spirit during and after his recent battle with cancer keeps me coming back to read not only his reviews but his insightful commentary on the everyday. But enough about a guy you know a lot about. I knew I was going to be a film critic—some would say a snob—in middle school, when I had to voraciously defend my position that The Royal Tenenbaums was only a million times better than Adam Sandler’s remake of Mr. Deeds. From then on, I would seek out Wes Anderson’s films and avoid Sandler’s like the plague. Still, I like to think of myself as a populist, and I’ll be just as likely to see the next superhero movie as the next Sundance sensation. The thing I most deplore in a movie is laziness. I’d much rather see movies with big ambitions try and fail than movies with no ambitions succeed at simply existing. I’m also a big advocate of fun-bad movies like The Room and most of Nicolas Cage’s work. In the past, I’ve written for The Dallas Morning News and the North Texas Daily, which I edited for a semester. I also contributed to Dallas-based Pegasus News, which in the circle of life, is now part of The Dallas Morning News, where I got my big break in 2007. Eventually, I’d love to write and talk about film full-time, but until that’s a viable career option, I work as an auditor for Wells Fargo. I hope to one day meet my hero, go to the Toronto International Film Festival, and compete on Jeopardy. Until then, I’m excited to share my love of film with you.

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