Box office report: ‘Noah’ wreaks Old Testament havoc on its competitors
Russell Crowe’s grungy beard — presumably as well as other elements of Noah – drew in $44 million this weekend, perching it atop a Mount Ararat of box office receipts with a moderately impressive sum by any measurement (including cubits). Darren Aronofsky’s Biblical bonanza took the No. 1 spot, knocking all the films from last week’s Top 5 down one slot. The theologically loose adaptation fared better than the last time Crowe went gallivanting around in a tunic, in 2010′s Robin Hood. (That period epic only made $36 million in its first weekend.) However, there wasn’t exactly a rainbow at the end of the storm, considering audiences gave Noah a “C” CinemaScore rating.
The Divergent Games: City of Bones — er, Divergent – couldn’t quite muster enough YA fandom or non-reader interest to push its to-date take over the $100 million mark. The fantasy drama sits comfortably in a distant second with $26.5 million for the weekend, making for a grand total of $95.3 million. With a reported budget of $85 million, this certainly isn’t a dystopian scenario for the proposed trilogy, but it is less than half of what both films in The Hunger Games series had made by the end of their second weekends.
In third place, Muppets Most Wanted slipped only 33 percent from its opening weekend to $11.4 million, bringing its total up to $33.2 million. The film — a sequel to the 2011 reboot of the beloved Jim Henson characters — isn’t performing quite as strongly as its predecessor, but as Kermit knows, it ain’t easy making green. The other family-friendly film on offer, DreamWorks Animation’s Mr. Peabody and Sherman, followed up in fourth with $9.5 million.
Putting Judeo-Christian-based films both on the top and bottom of this weekend’s Top 5, the pro-deity tract God’s Not Dead found an additional $9.1 million in the collection plate this Sunday, bringing it to more than $22 million all together. Ah-nold’s drug bust thriller Sabotage, on the other hand, seems to have been forsaken, belly-flopping into seventh place with only $5.3 million — pretty dismal for a movie with so much supposed star power.
Here’s the Top 5:
1) Noah – $44 million
2) Divergent – $26.5 million
3) Muppets Most Wanted – $11.4 million
4) Mr. Peabody and Sherman – $9.5 million
5) God’s Not Dead – $9.1 million