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Box Office Report: ‘Lego Batman’ And ’50 Shades’ Repeat, Beat New Releases

By Nick Younker
Published on: 14:09 PST, Feb 19, 2017

The post-Valentine’s Day box office had a modest return, but certainly not the best that Hollywood has ever had following a February breakthrough for major industry films that try to cash in on the sweetheart holiday. With Valentine’s Day falling on a Tuesday this year, that essentially split the holiday box office in two, forcing both weekends to compete with each other for top honors.

As many may have come to expect, Fifty Shades Darker played a significant role in the dual box office holiday returns from Valentine’s Day, but never quite put it over the top of a children’s favorite, according to Box Office Mojo. The film had some serious mojo going into it following the enormous success of the Fifty Shades series of books that have been a worldwide phenomenon in the literary world, but don’t say that to Stephen King.

For the second weekend in a row, The LEGO Batman Movie is the reigning champ over Fifty Shades Darker, leaving the “made specifically for Valentine’s Day” movie in lurch with an impressive $34 million and staying $13 million ahead of Fifty Shades, which came in at just under $21 million.

Additionally, this is the second weekend in a row that The LEGO Batman Movie has embarrassed the erotic drama since both debuted last weekend to modest returns at the box office as well. The LEGO Batman Movie pulled in $53 million while Fifty Shades Darker fell just behind it at $46 million, putting the movie to shame on its power day. By comparison, that’s almost like the Boston Red Sox losing Game 7 of the NLCS to the New York Yankees… at Fenway Park. It’s just salt on the wound, so to speak.

Speaking of insults and embarrassing box office returns, is there anyone out there that is still a Matt Damon fan? It sure doesn’t appear so, because his major budget ($150 million) film debuted in third place this weekend behind the two aforementioned frontrunners that were holdovers from the previous weekend.

On such a high budget film for Matt Damon, The Great Wall only cashed out at the box office with an embarrassing $18 million haul, which is just over 10 percent of its budget. If the producers for the film and Universal Studios want to get any of their money back, they had better hope that it has a better international welcome at the box office. But for a movie about the Great Wall in China starring Matt Damon as the film’s star hero, they probably shouldn’t expect the Chinese to flock to the theaters.

That’s even worse for The Great Wall because outside of the American market, China, Japan, and the United Kingdom markets are always the next biggest providers at the box office. That doesn’t bode well for Universal or Matt Damon at this time, which there also isn’t no indication that The Great Wall is building up any hype at the domestic box office either.

There does seem to be one film that is reaching newsworthy status at the box office, besides all the new releases coming out and performing poorly. M. Night Shyamalan’s Split brought in $7 million in its fifth week of release, bringing its total domestic box office haul up to $123 million. This seems to be a return for Shyamalan to his former box office glory days when he was putting out films like The Sixth Sense, Signs, and Unbreakable.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story seems to be losing its flame and fizzling out of the box office limelight, pulling in a meager $746,000 at the box office this weekend in its tenth week of release. But the film pulled off over $1 billion worldwide box office return and that includes an impressive $528 million at the U.S. box office.

[Featured Image by Universal]

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