THE FAULT IN OUR STARS (20th) was expected to get off to a quick start, thanks to its wildly enthusiastic young female fanbase, and it did: $8.2M, a huge number for a non-special effects movie. (It includes shows at 650 theatres with $25 tickets that bought fans a closed-circuit interview with cast and crew and other goodies along with the movie itself.) That’s in the same ballpark as the $8.7M Thursday night box office for The Amazing Spider-Man and the $8.2M for X-Men: Days of Future Past, and it’s far higher than the $4.9M for Divergent, a more mainstream genre YA hit that also starred Shailene Woodley and featured Ansel Elgort.
Divergent had a $54.6M weekend, but Fault, with a narrower demo appeal, is likely to be more front-loaded–the question, which we won’t really know until Saturday’s numbers have come in, will be by how much. The Twilight movies tended to plunge 40% or more from their Friday box office, but Fault has much more critical acclaim going for it, which might help draw in ticketbuyers outside the target demo. In any case, Fault is on target to be one of the most profitable movies of the summer, considering its tiny $12M production pricetag (which admittedly becomes more like $100M+ once worldwide marketing is added in). It should also sweep the weekend in the US.
EDGE OF TOMORROW (Warners) can only hope for Tom Cruise’s foreign fans to show up. The vastly more expensive Edge (Warners admits to a $178M production budget, which means $325M+ with marketing, and considering the re-shoots needed to get the film in final form, that may be a conservative figure) pulled in just $1.8M on Thursday night, a puny result by any reckoning–and one that includes 3D and IMAX ticket prices. That’s considerably below 300: Rise of An Empire last spring, which sold $3.3M worth of tickets on Thursday night on its way to a $45M weekend. About the best that can be said for the Edge start is that it was better than the $1.1M Thursday night for Cruise’s Oblivion, which had a $37.1M opening weekend–a number that Warners would be thrilled to duplicate here.
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