Weekend Box Office:
Three Major Films Crash and Burn in Same Weekend
The 2017 Martin Luther King holiday will go down in history as the weekend when three high-profile studio movies bombed, including Martin Scorsese's
Silence and Ben Affleck's
Live by Night. And it is only the second time in a decade that a movie hasn't grossed $30 million or more over the holiday.
Live By Night, playing in 2,822 theaters, earned an estimated $6.1 million for the four-day weekend. That's bleak news for Affleck and his home studio, Warner Bros., which spent a net $65 million to make the period gangster movie (tax incentives and rebates brought the budget down from $90 million).
Live by Night, which first opened in select theaters over the year-end holidays, was unable to compete against a glut of other adult dramas after getting dinged poor reviews and a B CinemaScore. It also is struggling overseas, where it opened to $3.3 million from its first 28 markets, including a dismal U.K. opening of $873,000.
The forecast is even worse for
Silence, which likewise expanded nationwide over the weekend into a total of 747 theaters. The epic historical drama is tipped to earn $1.9 million over the three days and $2.3 million over four after costing $50 million to make.
Silence, which was financed independently and distributed by Paramount, will be one of Scorsese's lowest-grossing features in the U.S. unless it nabs top Oscar nominations.
Paramount didn't have a good holiday, no matter how you look at it. The ill-fated family film
Monster Trucks is the first $100 million-plus loser of 2017 with an estimated four-day gross of $15 million from 3,111 locations. While that's slightly more than expected — thanks to strong showing in rural markets and an A CinemaScore — the movie cost a hefty $125 million to make and prompted parent company Viacom to take a $115 million write-down even before it opened. Overseas, the CGI/live-action hybrid has grossed $14.7 million to date for a global cume of $29.7 million.
On a brighter note,
Hidden Figures — the biographical drama about three black female NASA mathematicians who helped put the first man into space — continues to hold at No. 1. From Fox 2000 and Chernin Entertainment, the movie won the box-office race last weekend with $22.8 million and is easily winning the MLK weekend race with an estimated $26 million. The pic, now available in 3,286 cinemas, has now grossed nearly $60 million domestically.
Box-Office Pileup: Three Major Films Crash and Burn in Same Weekend
