Battle at the Box Office 1/20

Ride Along absolutely crushed the box office this weekend with the highest ever January opening and the highest opening for an original comedy since Ted.  Beating Cloverfield for January openings, Ride Along took in $41.2 million and, unless something drastic happens, should make over $100 million since it has excellent word of mouth and pretty much no competition for the next few weeks.  It’s also PG-13, which lets a much wider audience attend.  Lone Survivor dropped down to second with another $23.2 million and has made over $74 million total and also has excellent word of mouth, so it should hang with Ride Along for a few weeks.

The Nut Job was a surprisingly strong third place with $20.6 million.  It’s up from Open Road Studios November release, Free Birds, and Frozen, while probably infinitely better, has been out for over two months, so probably most families saw it already and hit up The Nut Job as their next movie to see.

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit had a kind of mediocre fourth place opening with $17.2 million.  That is only better than The Hunt for Red October for openings in the Jack Ryan series and it just barely beat it, even though tickets prices are probably at least double what they were in 1990.

The aforementioned Frozen rounded out the top 5 with another $11.9 million, putting it over $332 million total.

Way down on the list, The Devil’s Due bombed with a seventh place opening of $8.5 million, half of what the already out of theaters PA: The Marked Ones made and way off from other horror movies released in January like The Devil Inside, Mama, even The Rite.

Going down in a fiery wreck, The Legend of Hercules dropped from third place to thirteenth place in it’s second weekend with only $3.4 million.  At this point, The Rock’s Hercules movie could just be The Rock sitting in an armchair reading a book on mythology and it would still probably make more than Legend of Hercules.