Weekend Box Office Report: Johnny Depp Can’t Stop ‘American Sniper’

Last week, ‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1’ squeaked past ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ to become the highest grossing film released in 2014. Now, it’s starting to look thing ‘American Sniper’ may clobber them both. With a massive second weekend in wide release, the Clint Eastwood war film looks practically unstoppable at this point. With little to no major competition for the next few weeks, it should easily crack $300 million.

With a weekend gross of $64 million, ‘American Sniper’ cracked $200 million. More importantly, check out that percentage drop of only 27%. That’s the kind of number that makes it clear that this movie isn’t just doing well. Audiences actually like it. Word of mouth alone is making this into an unlikely blockbuster and it’s hard to see if anything at all will be able to slow it down in the next month.

Second place also saw some success, albeit on a much smaller scale. The Jennifer Lopez thriller ‘The Boy Next Door’ opened with a decent $15 million, which isn’t bad for a movie of this size. It could very well plummet in the next week, but this is the kind of generic, Redbox-friendly movie that will have a long shelf life beyond theaters.

But all was not well in this top 10. ‘Strange Magic’ rode its atrocious marketing campaign to a predictable end, opening in seventh pace with a pitiful $5 million. Everyone was expecting that. Everyone was also expecting ‘Mortdecai’ to open poorly, but few people saw ninth place and $4 million. This is Johnny Depp’s third major bomb in a row, which could very well mean that Hollywood’s most famous quirky actor is probably going to retreat into more ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ movies for the foreseeable future.

Other than those, the rest of the numbers look pretty solid all around. ‘Paddington’ continued to take advantage of being the only worthwhile family movie in theaters at the moment, grossing $12 million for a $40 million total. Combine that with its overseas success and you have a fairly substantial hit. ‘The Wedding Ringer’ did similar business, not coming close to some of star Kevin Hart’s most recent successes, but well enough to guarantee him continuing to make a few films a year for a while longer. Elsewhere, ‘Into the Woods’ began to slow down significantly, but no one is going to sneer at a $121 million gross.

In Oscar-land, ‘The Imitation Game’ continued to (for lack of a more elegant term) kick ass, holding steady with $7 million for the weekend and $60 million total. At this rate, $100 million is looking very possible (but the movie was already a sizable hit $10 million ago). ‘Selma’ hasn’t found the same level of success, but it should cross $40 million in the next 24 hours and it should be able to ride word of mouth (and Oscar-snub-buzz) to $60 million or so.

And then there’s ‘Taken 3,’ which is running out of steam much faster than its predecessors. It should still hit $100 million, but barely. This is a franchise that has officially run its course, monetarily speaking. Ah, who are we kidding? Creatively speaking, too.