Battle at the Box Office 4/3

A diminutive Alec Baldwin managed to topple the juggernaut that is Beauty and the Beast but it was still extremely close at the box office this weekend.

The Boss Baby took in $49 million to win the box office, the tenth best opening for Dreamworks animation between How to Train Your Dragon 2 and Kung Fu Panda 2.  It’s the fourth best opening for Dreamworks for a non-sequel movie.  It has competition the next two weekends, so it may drop quickly as the market gets saturated.

Beauty and the Beast took in another $47.5 million, putting it over $395 million and putting it at #26 on the all time domestic charts.  Combined with it’s international box office, it’s made over $877 million and it’s performance is outpacing things like The Dark Knight, so it seems like a $1 billion+ is close at hand.

Ghost in the Shell took third with $19 million, which considering it cost $110 million, is kind of a disaster for Paramount.  The previous solo ScarJo action movie, Lucy, made more than double that in it’s opening weekend and was also rated R (Ghost was PG-13).  It’s also a worse opening than movies like After Earth and Ender’s Game.  The movie hasn’t opened in Japan and China yet but even if the home of the source material embraces it like say, China did Warcraft, it will probably go down as a flop.

Power Rangers and Kong: Skull Island rounded out the top 5 with the latter suffering a massive 64% drop from last week with $14.5 million and bringing it’s total up to $65 million.

Further down the list, The Zookeeper’s Wife was the best performing movie of the weekend, making $3.3 million in only 541 theaters and making it into tenth place.