Battle at the Box Office 6/9

With most of it’s teenage, female fans rushing out on Thursday and Friday, The Fault in Our Stars won the weekend box office with a front loaded $48 million, earning one of the best romantic drama openings of recent years.  It’s down slightly from star Shailene Woodley’s last movie, Divergent, but that had slightly more crossover appeal while Fault is firmly a chick flick.  82% of the audience was female and 79% of them were under 25.

Continuing the Girl Power trend, Maleficent dropped to number two but still earned a solid $33.5 million, dropping about 50% from last weekend’s debut.

Tom Cruise had to settle for a pretty disappointing third place finish with Edge of Tomorrow earning $29.1 million.  It’s about even with Elysium and John Carter openings but way down from other massive sci-fi action movies, like Pacific Rim and last year’s Cruise movie, Oblivion.  The movie earned massive critical acclaim but audiences were just “OK” about it, according to the audience polling Cinemascore service, so it may drop off sharply in the next week or two and will most likely struggle to get close to $100 million.

X-Men: Days of Future Past and A Million Ways to Die in the West rounded out the top 5, with the latter suffering basically a death blow in terms of drop in audience for comedies and will be a bomb with a sub $50 million overall total.

There are two potentially massive hits this coming weekend as How to Train Your Dragon 2, the first huge animated movie in a while, and 22 Jump Street both hit.  I would bet Dragon will probably take it, as it has the family appeal and also should have strong 3D attendance, which was the main selling point of the first movie.