LOS ANGELES — The box-office debut of Battleship - an attempt to transform the kids’ strategy pastime into a summer blockbuster - looked like a very different board game over the weekend: trouble.
Universal Pictures’ $209 million alien invasion spectacle fizzled badly in its domestic premiere, grossing $25.5 million and finishing a distant second to the third weekend of Disney’s TheAvengers, according to Sunday estimates. The debut of Battleship - whose ticket sales were about 40 percent lower than some predictions - was even worse than the $30.2 million March opening of John Carter, one of the biggest flops in Hollywood history, and the film’s audience was surprisingly old.
Lionsgate and Alcon Entertainment’s ensemble pregnancy comedy What to Expect When You’re Expecting, which cost $40 million, generated poor opening numbers of $10.5 million, about half the amount that some prognosticators had anticipated, finishing in fifth place. Paramount Pictures’ pricey Sacha Baron Cohen comedy The Dictator grossed a modest $17.4 millionin its first three days, good for third place, but it did much better overseas, which is unusual for a studio comedy.
Battleship and What to Expect were savaged by critics, while The Dictator received mixed to somewhat positive notices.
Meanwhile, the returns for The Avengers were again extraordinary.
In taking the top spot for the third consecutive weekend with estimated domestic sales of $55.6 million and an additional $56 million overseas, the Disney superhero tale has become the studio’s highest-grossing release of all time, with global ticket sales of $1.18 billion, passingPirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, which had total receipts of $1.06 billion.
Over the weekend, the film surpassed the Pirates sequel and Toy Story 3 as Disney’s top domestic release ever. With cumulative domestic ticket sales of $457.7 million to date, The Avengers is on track to surpass $600 million in domestic release and could possibly reach $700 million.
Not factoring in inflation, only one other movie ever has grossed more than $700 million in U.S. and Canadian theaters - 2009’s Avatar, which totaled $760.5 million. Titanic, also from writer-director James Cameron, is the only other movie to surpass$600 million domestically, grossing $658.5 million. But The Avengers’ consecutive grip on first place is likely to fall this weekend, when Columbia’s Men in Black 3 hits multiplexes.
In third place, the $65 million The Dictator, a comedy about a fictional North African leader, split audiences. The film performed poorly in the South and the Midwest, but turned in respectable numbers from some European markets such as the Netherlands. The film’s overseas ticket sales were $30.3 million, ahead of the pace ofCohen’s 2006 breakout, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
In fourth place was Johnny Depp’s Dark Shadows with $12.5 million, a drop of 57 percent from two weeks ago, while What to Expect was fifth.
In sixth place and continuing to perform well with older patrons was Fox Searchlight’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, with $3.2 million in just 354 theaters. The comedy about British pensioners who travel to India for their retirement has grossed $8.2 million domestically.
MovieStyle, Pages 34 on 05/25/2012