‘X-Men’ and ‘Alice’ lead a tepid Memorial Day weekend box office
It was a disappointing holiday weekend for both 20th Century Fox and Disney as X-Men: Apocalypse and Alice Through the Looking Glass both underperformed.
Things were much bleaker for “Alice Through the Looking Glass”.
Before Heard’s court appearance on Friday, Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” sequel had been expected to open above $60 million.
“Alice Through the Looking Glass” scored 34 out of 100 on the review aggregator website Metacritic.
“These allegations, if true, pose a serious threat to the box-office longevity of Johnny Depp“, box office analyst Jeff Bock told the Hollywood Reporter.
Reviews of the movie, directed by James Bobin, have been pretty disastrous too, its star-studded cast including Johnny Depp, Mia Wasikowska, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen not managing to pull the film’s plot together. But the seventh X-Men installment opened well below the $90.8 million debut of 2014s X-Men: Days of Future Past or the $132.4 million bow of Februarys X-Men spinoff Deadpool..
Allegations of domestic violence after wife Amber Heard filed for divorce seem to have damaged Disney’s sequel to Alice in Wonderland, which took a spectacular $1.2 billion six years ago. The picture cost $178 million to produce, according to Box Office Mojo, another researcher. With an estimated $19.7 million for the weekend and $1.1 billion worldwide, it remains a high point in the Marvel crown. “We make these big bets and sometimes they really pay off. We took one here, but it did not do the kind of business we were hoping”. Disney estimates that it will gross $35.6 million over the four-day weekend.
However, The “Alice 2” got 65 million dollars on its debut overseas, earning a strong 27.1 million dollars in China.
Despite this, Screen Crush did note that “X-Men: Apocalypse” still has not performed as expected, although in this case it seems to have some company with another film that has surprisingly been expected to do so, but has not.
In the fifth spot, it’s “Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising”, starring Seth Rogen and Zac Efron.
Last week’s top earner, The Angry Birds Movie, proved that video game adaptations don’t always have to plummet from week to week as it recedes to the No. 3 position, earning an estimated $18.7 million ($24.5 million four-day) from 3,932 theaters.