It looks like Spider-Man’s biggest villains this weekend were Seth Rogen and Zac Efron. The duo’s “Neighbors” knocked Sony‘s superhero from the top slot with a big $51 million opening.
Just how big was it? It’s the fourth best opening ever for an R-rated comedy. Damn. But it wasn’t just a big success at home. Overseas, the comedy took $34.4 million—more than the entire international tally of “This Is The End“—in its first weekend. And in another surprising statistic, the audience for the film was 53% female. So much for Seth Rogen and bros only playing to … bros. Basically, this is an all around success for Universal, with the movie clearly hitting all the quadrants it needed to, bang on.
But the same can’t be said for “The Amazing Spider-Man 2.” It continues to underperform domestically. It dropped 59% week-to-week versus 44% for the first film, and when all is said and done, the sequel is projected to finish about $700 million, or about what the first movie did. Sure, it will make a small profit and Sony won’t lose their shirts, but this is not what you want in a major franchise reboot. Certainly, Sony was aiming much higher than this and with two more sequels planned, and spinoffs, they are really going to figure out how to get domestic audiences to care about this series, as their interest is clearly fading.
Elsewhere in the top ten, there were no real surprises, with “The Other Woman” and “Heaven Is For Real” playing strong to their niches. But in limited release there are some movies definitely worth paying attention to.
Jon Favreau‘s “Chef” nabbed the best per-screen-average with $204,000 on six screens or $34,000 each. A nice start for the little movie. Gia Coppola‘s “Palo Alto” also played strong with $80, 640 on four screens, or roughly $20,000 on each. Again, not bad. Meanwhile, Wes Anderson‘s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is steadily doing very, very good business and this weekend passed “The Royal Tenenbaums” as the director’s best performing movie ever, earning $52.7 million to date and counting.
1. “Neighbors” $51,070,000
2. “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” $37,200,000 ($147,900,000)
3. “The Other Woman” $9,250,000 ($61,730,000)
4. “Heaven is for Real” $7,000,000 ($75,220,000)
5. “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” $5,619,000 ($244,997,000)
6. “Rio 2” $5,125,000 ($113,165,000)
7. “Moms’ Night Out” $4,200,000
8. “Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return” $3,705,000
9. “Divergent” $1,700,000 ($145,024,000)
10. “Brick Mansions” $1,480,000 ($18,328,000)
