Fifty Shades of Black flops in the box office alongside Jane Got a Gun.
Last week, the movie studios behind any movie that underperformed blamed it on the snow storm, and this weekend’s numbers largely prove that they are right.
None of the old releases in the top 10 dropped more than 34% this weekend, which extremely good nowadays. In addition, overall business increased 46% over the same weekend last year.
Leading the way was Kung Fu Panda 3, which earned $41 million, which is $7 million down from last year’s Kung Fu Panda 2. It cost studios $145 million to produce.
While major motion pictures did extremely well in the box office – The Revenant, Star Wars, Ride Along 2 – the new releases, other than Kung Fu Panda 3, flopped.
The Finest Hours, starring Casey Affleck, earned only $10.3 million, which is bad news for a movie that cost $70 million to make.
But, the movie that was hit the hardest was Marlon Wayans‘ Fifty Shades of Black, which earned $6.186 million. In fact, the movie earned a horrible C Cinemascore, which is shocking, considering that’s a survey from a group of people who actually wanted to see the movie.
According to data posted on Box Office Mojo, Fifty Shades of Black is the worst Box Office opening in nearly 20 years for Marlon Wayans. Scary Movie earned $42 million on it’s opening weekend and Wayans’ latest parody, A Haunted House 2 earned $8.8 million on it’s opening weekend. Wayans commented that he has a “science” to making parody movies but, he may have to go back to the laboratory.
Supposedly the movie only cost $5 million to make, which explains why we keep seeing so many of these parody movies.
Other than Marlon Wayans’ parody movies, Natalie Portman’s Jane Got a Gun, which suffered a ton of behind the scenes drama, also flopped.
The producers had sunk too much time and resources into Jane to let it die, but the Weinsteins also couldn’t afford to spend any more money on a film that seemed doomed to fail. As one final gambit, the producers opted into what’s called a “service deal,” an arrangement where they would actually pay the distributors a flat fee and small percentage of the box-office returns just to get it into theaters, at no additional expense to the Weinstein Company. It’s a bare-bones deal, wherein the distributors have no obligation to pony up any of their own money for publicity and advertising.
The movie did so bad, it didn’t even break six figures.
With an estimated $803,000 from 1,210 theaters, the film scored a mere $664 per theater average. This is, by far, the worst wide release opening in Portman’s career and the worst opening on a per theater average with 2011’s Hesher, which opened in 42 theaters with $126,046 ($3,001 PTA), a distant second. [BoxOfficeMojo]
Next week brings us the highly anticipated and marketed Coen brothers’ movie Hail, Caesar!, Nicholas Sparks’ The Choice, and the zombie drama Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
