Weekend Estimates: Dragon Tops Alice, But Doesn't Set Box Office on Fire
March 28, 2010
As expected, How to Train Your Dragon comfortably won the weekend at the box office, but its early performance can be best described as solid rather than spectacular.
With $43.3 million over the weekend, according to Paramount's Sunday estimate, it was easily able to beat Alice in Wonderland ($17.3 million, per Disney), but falls some way behind the opening of Monsters vs. Aliens, which debuted this weekend last year.
Given Dragon's better reviews, it should have better legs than Monsters vs. Aliens, but it has a lot of work to do if it's going to earn much more than $100 million.
In third place, MGM will be fairly happy with the estimated $13.65 million opening from Hot Tub Time Machine, which could well be their swan song as a theatrical distributor.
The comedy gave them their best opening weekend since Halloween back in 2007.
The early signs point to Hot Tub having good word of mouth among the movie-going population that was watching John Cusack movies in the 1980s.
Lower down the chart, Focus successfully expanded Greenberg into 181 theaters and earned $1.1 million through the weekend.
Sony had a less successful debut with Chloe, which just scraped over $1 million from 350 theaters.
That, however, looks pretty good itself compared to The Runaways, which slipped 45% from its opening weekend to $445,000 from 237 venues for Apparition.
As we noted last week, expansion will be a challenge from that point.
Filed under: Weekend Estimates, Hot Tub Time Machine, Alice in Wonderland, How to Train Your Dragon, Greenberg, The Runaways, Chloe