By Dustin Rowles | Box Office Round-Ups | August 31, 2015 |
By Dustin Rowles | Box Office Round-Ups | August 31, 2015 |
If you have a movie opening on over 2,000 screens, and it doesn’t make at least $5 million on opening weekend, it’s likely as a result of being 1) a terrible movie, and/or 2) with a horrible marketing strategy and/or 3) it has a terrible title. Oogieloves In The BIG Balloon Adventure had a potent combination of all three, and as a result, it has the worst box-office opening weekend of all time, followed by Delgo and this weekend’s newest entry into the worst openings of all time: We Are Your Friends.
Terrible movie? Check.
Bad marketing? Never saw an ad or trailer for it before attending, so check.
Bad title? I have to look it up practically every time I reference it, so it’s not memorable.
Most movies that open on over 2,000 theaters will at least grab a few people in each showing standing in the mall who buy a ticket based solely on the movie title. That wasn’t the case here. We Are Your Friends was a disaster.
Here’s the 25 Worst Opening Weekends of All Time (2,000 screens or more).
1. Oogieloves In The BIG Balloon Adventure — $445,000
2. Delgo — $511,000
3. We Are Your Friends — $1.8 million
4. P2 — $2.083 milion
5. Major League: Back to the Minors — $2.087 million
6. The Real Cancun — $2.10 million
7. College — $2.15 million
8. The Adventures of Pluto Nash — $2.18 million
9. Bandslam — $2.23 million
10. Bandslam, $2.23 million
11. All Dogs Go To Heaven 2 — $2.25 million
12. Chasing Mavericks — $2.26 million
13. Deception — $2.3 million
14. I Dreamed of Africa — $2.41 million
15. Teacher’s Pet — $2.46 million
16. Grind — $2.5 million
17. Won’t Back Down — $2.60 million
18. The Rocker — $2.6 million
19. Lucky You — $2.6 million
20. From Justin to Kelly — $2.7 million
21. The Last Legion — $2.74 million
22. Thunderbirds — $2.77 million
23. Alone in the Dark — $2.8 million
24. Most Wanted — $2.83 million
25. Almost Heroes — $2.83 million
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One good note on We Are Your Friends, however, was that every time I saw Wes Bentley, I thought of him as the American Beauty guy who grew up and wanted to be Wolverine.
The news was not all bad at the box office this weekend, however. Straight Outta Compton was the top film at the box office with $13.2 million and surpassed Walk the Line for the highest grossing biopic of all time. Somewhere, Jerry Heller is taking credit for this.
In the good news/terrible news department, another movie with an all-black cast managed to snag the number two spot. War Room nearly topped Compton this weekend, but the two movies could not be more different. War Room — which I assume most of our readers have never heard of — is a Christian evangelical film, and the message of it is this: If your husband beats you, cheats on your, or embezzles from his job, hide from him in a closet, pray for him to stop, and go back to him with the hope that God took care of the situation. If you prayed hard enough, it should work!
No, really. That’s the message of War Room.
Meanwhile, No Escape, the problematic (Internet Word!) movie starring Owen Wilson managed $8.3 million, which was nearly in line with expectations. More troubling is the fact that audiences didn’t hate it. It mustered a B with Cinemascore.
*Despite what it may look like from this post, and from my opinion of We Are Friends, I actually do like Zac Efron, and think he’s got some modest talent.