This weekend’s box office report is met with two new arrivals in the form of Resident Evil: Retribution and Find Nemo 3D. It was certainly interesting to hear that Retribution surpassed its predecessor After Life in midnight showings with over $660k brought in for the late night debut, but the question throughout Friday was whether it would have enough love from fans and potential first-timers to make the fifth Resident Evil movie a legitimate hit.
The short is ‘no,’ but it did manage to win the weekend with the best opening day since mid-August’s release of The Expendables 2. Paul W.S. Anderson’s latest offering in the saga banked $8.4 million on Friday which compares unfavorably to the $10.7 million the franchise debuted to two years ago. Considering reviews were not very kind, to expect a bump probably would be too much, but nonetheless Resident Evil still has enough cachet to make the rest of September look foolish. Expect a $20 million weekend from the action horror flick.
In terms of family fare, audiences had Finding Nemo 3D to check out. This is a bit disappointing though as the flick re-released to $5.1 million on the day. For comparative purposes, The Lion King 3D found $8.9 million for its first Friday suggesting a steep drop-off in such offerings could be in the cards. While Disney’s old-fashioned animation found $30 million in ticket sales one-year ago, it looks like Finding Nemo 3D is destined to come in below $20 million. Saturday and Sunday are presumed to be the big days for this one so let’s be cautious and not simply extrapolate this out to an unexpectedly weak three-day in the mid-teens (animated re-release trending suggests $16 million as opposed to the industry guess of $18 million.)
As for the rest of the field (The Possession, Lawless, The Words, etc.,) just assume everything dropped about 40%. Those offerings performed so terribly that they would all be considered bottom feeders on the top ten list under more healthy industry conditions.