Noah cruises past box-office rivals
LOS ANGELES — Director Darren Aronofsky’s biblical epic Noah sailed at the weekend box office as the film opened at No. 1 with an estimated $44 million US in ticket sales, while Divergent dropped off sharply and Cesar Chavez got off to a slow start.
Noah, which cost about $130 million to make, solidly met expectations, according to Paramount Pictures, which had initially forecast a $30-million opening weekend. Noah already has generated about $95 million overseas.
The film brought in a diverse crowd, said Megan Colligan, Paramount’s president of domestic marketing and distribution. It drew a 50-50 split of male and female audience members and generated strong turnout among Christians, Latinos and AfricanAmericans, plus “lots of Aronofsky fans in major cities,” Colligan said.
“There was a pretty good balance of age ranges but a little bit of an older crowd, which we expected,” she said.
Viewers at one packed theatre in Santa Monica, Calif., gave the film a standing ovation recently.
“At first I thought maybe we walked into the wrong movie — it was a little cheesy of a start,” said Astacia Christenson, 36. “But it worked out because you got into the characters, there was some good acting and the story picked up and got more interesting. The movie saved itself.”
Good or not, Noah far outdistanced Divergent, which gener- ated $26.5 million in its second weekend — a 51 per cent decline from its opening but still good enough for No. 2 on the boxoffice list. Based on a youngadult novel series, the Lionsgate film, directed by Neil Burger and starring Shailene Woodley, tells the story of a young woman fighting for freedom and survival in a dystopian society.
Though the new biopic Cesar Chavez received an A grade from filmgoers, according to the polling firm CinemaScore, the film generated only $3 million in its opening weekend, good for 12th place. Its per-screen average of about $4,500 was little more than one-third of that for Noah.
Disney’s Muppets Most Wanted finished third, generating $11.4 million, and Mr. Peabody & Sherman finished fourth with $9.5 million. But delivering a bigger surprise — again — was God’s Not Dead, which with about $9.1 million finished fifth for the second week in a row. The faith-based film, about a college student defending his beliefs against a professor, features Kevin Sorbo, Dean Cain, the popular Christian rock group Newsboys, and Willie and Korie Robertson from the Duck Dynasty television show as themselves.
Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel expanded to 977 theatres from about 300 theatres and saw its weekend box office rise 30 per cent. With a weekend take of $8.8 million, the film has brought in $24.5 million during its slow rollout.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s new crime thriller, Sabotage, finished seventh with $5.3 million in its opening weekend. The picture, which cost about $35 million to make, received negative reviews from critics.