Battle at the Box Office 2/16

The fan fiction managed to defeat the franchise that inspired it this weekend as Fifty Shades of Grey managed to outdo the original Twilight, plus pretty much every other February release ever, during the Valentine’s Day weekend.  The smutty S&M drama brought in over $85 million, plus $158 million internationally.  The movie was in the largest number of theaters ever for an R rated film and had the fourth highest R rated opening of all time and the highest ever February opening.  There’s potential for it to nose dive though now that VD holiday is over, but the competition is also pretty light next weekend, so it could go either way.

Kingsman was a distant but still strong second place, giving Matthew Vaughn his second highest opening of all time with $36.2 million and on par with recent action movies like Taken 3 and The Equalizer.  It could potentially hold way better than Fifty Shades as well, because the boyfriends who got dragged to Fifty Shades this past weekend will probably drag their significant other to Kingsman in the next week or so, as there’s not really another big action movie until next month.

Sponge Out of Water dropped slightly under 50% from last weekend’s winning weekend, making another $31.6 million.  It’s made over $100 million in it’s two weeks out though.

American Sniper and Jupiter Ascending rounded out the top 5, the latter of which will probably make $50 million if things go well, but that’s a bit off from it’s $176 million budget.   Seventh Son, last weekend’s other huge bomb, is doing even worse than Jupiter Ascending, making only another $4 million and it’s made barely $13 million in it’s two weeks out and it cost over $95 milllion to make.

Further down the list, Project Almanac suffered the biggest drop, going from fifth to tenth with $2.8 million.