Battle at the Box Office 5/30

Neither of the big Memorial Day weekend movies made the impact their studios were expecting, as both opened on or far below expectations.

X-Men: Apocalypse took the top spot at the box office with $65 million for the weekend, making it sixth as far as openings for the X-Men franchise.  With the holiday, it should make between $77-80 million total.  It’s about $30 million off from where Days of Future Past was in 2014 and it also got the worst reviews for the franchise.  It’s going to be a battle this coming weekend to hold the top spot against the TMNT.

Alice Through the Looking Glass took second but it will probably be considered a massive bomb, as it was off almost 60% from the opening of Alice in Wonderland and only took in $28 million, worse than the openings for both Tomorrowland and The Lone Ranger.  It had a budget of $170 million, so Disney will probably lose some money on that one but they’ve already made over $4 billion for the year between Zootopia, The Jungle Book and Captain America: Civil War.  With almost 80% of ticket buyers also opting for 2D over 3D, it seems to prove the first movie’s success was just a fluke of good timing, as it came out right after Avatar mania when people were desperate for more 3D.

The Angry Birds Movie dropped to third with another $18.7 million, putting it over $66 million for it’s two weeks out.

Civil War and Neighbors 2 rounded out the top 5, with the former becoming the highest grossing film of 2016 right now with over $372 million domestically and it’s the 16th highest grossing film of all time behind Transformers: Age of Extinction.

Jumping onto the top ten in it’s first big expansion was the Jane Austen based comedy Love & Friendship, which made $2.5 million in 446 theaters and took ninth place.