Biggest ever for both star DiCaprio and director Scorsese:
1. Shutter Island: $41.1 million (NEW)
2. Valentine’s Day: $16.7 million (2nd week; drops 70%)
3. Avatar: $16.2 million
4. Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief: $15.3 million (2nd week; drops 51%)
5. The Wolfman: $9.9 million (2nd week; drops 69%)
actual numbers, not estimates
Shutter Island did even better than the Sunday estimates had guessed: almost $1 million better. I will be quite curious to see what kind of dropoff it gets next week. A small one will mean that not so many people are as pissed about how it ends as I am; a big dropoff may well mean that I’m not alone.
Speaking of dropoffs… Valentine’s Day had one of the worst second weekend dropoffs ever, and so did Wolfman. Conversely, Avatar has been holding so strong that its 31 percent drop this weekend — which saw it jump back up to No. 3 for the weekend! — is its biggest drop yet. What’ll be really interesting to watch is whether the film gets any boost from the Oscars, which are still two weeks away.
Oh, this is dreadful: Blood Done Sign My Name, which is wonderful and powerful but has received no marketing support at all, earned a paltry $82,739 from 95 screens, for a per-screen average of — *gulp* — $871. This is criminal. People should be seeing this movie instead of Shutter Island or Valentine’s Day. But most people don’t even know about it.
Hmm: Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer — an excellent film from an admitted child rapist, though thank God the movie has nothing to do with young girls — earned $45,752 on each of four screens, for the best per-screen of the weekend, far ahead of No. 2 Shutter Island ($13,729 at 2,991 venues). Will it continue to do as well as it goes wider?
Oh, the mysteries of the late-winter box office…
[numbers via Box Office Mojo]
