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Zac Efron Makes His Debut Among the 25 Worst Movie Openings of All Time

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.

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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.