Evil Dead, a remake of Sam Raimi’s 1981 horror classic, topped the weekend box office with a better-than-expected total of $26 million. While it wasn’t the strongest horror film debut of the year so far (the throwback, old school chiller Mama debuted with $28.4 million in February), the Evil Dead remake did surpass expectations and helped Hollywood to a rare 2013 box office victory. But Evil Dead had plenty of help as three films earned more than $20 million and three others, including the 3-D conversion of Jurassic Park, took in over $10 million. Collectively the total of the top 12 films was up 9.4% from the same weekend last year when The Hunger Games ruled the box office for the third straight week with $33.1 million.

 

Despite a modest year-over-year win last week and this weekend’s more substantial victory, the box office remains 12% behind 2012’s total at this point. In spite of strong debuts from Oz: The Great and Powerful, The Croods, and G.I. Joe Retaliation, which had only four days of release in March, but still managed to become the fifth highest-grossing film of the month, the overall box office in March mirrored the rest of the year with a 12% decline vs. March 2012, which was buoyed by The Hunger Games’ record-setting performance.

 

Weekend Box Office (Studio Estimates): April 5-7, 2013
	Film	Weekend Gross	Screens	Avg./ Screen	Total Gross	Wk#
1	Evil Dead	$26,000,000	3,025	$8,595	$26,000,000	1
2	G.I. Joe: Retaliation	$21,100,000	3,734	$5,651	$86,663,000	2
2	The Croods	$21,100,000	3,879	$5,440	$125,800,000	3
4	Jurassic Park 3D	$18,247,000	2,771	$6,585	$18,247,000	1
5	Olympus Has Fallen	$10,042,000	3,059	$3,283	$71,116,000	3
6	Tyler Perry's Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor	$10,000,000	2,047	$4,885	$38,383,000	2
7	Oz The Great and Powerful	$8,171,000	2,905	$2,813	$212,767,000	5
8	The Host	$5,239,000	3,202	$1,636	$19,665,000	2
9	The Call	$3,500,000	2,002	$1,748	$45,481,000	4
10	Admission	$2,054,000	1,407	$1,460	$15,373,000	3

 

Produced for just $17 million, the new Evil Dead was directed by Fede Alvarez (though Raimi, who directed the first three Evil Dead movies, was a producer on the film and his name was featured prominently in potent ad campaign for the movie). Alvarez doesn’t spare the gore in the remake, which ups the ante from the original considerably. Critics, especially those who write for horror film-oriented Websites were ecstatic over the often ingenious blood-letting in the Evil Dead remake, though audiences, which were (as is typical for this sort of horror film) 56% male, gave the film only a “C+” CinemaScore. This could presage a fairly short run for the film, though a fairly modest Friday to Saturday night drop does not indicate the kind of really bad word-of-mouth that makes for a precipitous drop.

 

The exact determination of this past weekend’s #2 film will have to wait until final numbers are released tomorrow, since studios are estimated $21.1 million for both G.I. Joe Retaliation and The Croods. The global tally for the new G.I. Joe movie has raced past the $200 million mark in just its second week of release. It is already close to topping the overseas total for the entire run of the first G.I. Joe movie, and appears to be on its way to restoring a franchise that was badly damaged by the heavily-hyped first movie that largely disappointed an audience that was expecting another Transformers-like hit. 

 

The Croods is also doing exceptionally well overseas, where it has earned $207 million of its global total of $332.6 million. This Dreamworks animated feature appears to be a solid hit, which will undoubtedly translate into a series of sequels.

 

Fourth place went to the new 3-D version of Jurassic Park, which also outperformed expectations with an estimated $18.2 million debut and a per-venue average of $6585, which was second only to Evil Dead’s $8595 among widely released films. The 3-D Jurassic Park’s domestic debut topped that of the 3-D Titanic, which earned $17.3 million during its North American bow. Whether Jurassic Park will do as well overseas (especially in China) and be able to match Titanic’s nearly $60 million total is anybody’s guess. In any case with the Blu-ray of Jurassic Park due in two weeks, the box office life of the Stephen Spielberg dinosaur epic is likely to be limited.

 

Antoine Fuqua’s Die Hard-like Olympus Has Fallen continues to do a little better than expected as it slipped just 29% in its third weekend and finished in a near dead heat with Tyler Perry’s Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor, which dropped 54% in its second weekend.

 

The seventh place film, Sam Raimi’s Oz: The Great and Powerful became the first 2013 movie to surpass the $200 million mark as it brought in an estimated $8.2 million to bring its domestic total to $212.8 million after five weekends of release. The new Oz movie has earned $241.3 million overseas for a total of $454.1 million, which means that film can be considered a modest success for Disney, which spent $215 million on the prequel to the 1939 classic Wizard of Oz.

 

In limited release the crime movie The Place Beyond the Pines, which stars Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Rose Byrne, and Eva Mendes expanded to 30 theaters and still managed a robust $23,167 per venue, while another stylish indie thriller, Danny Boyle’s Trance, averaged $34,000 at four theaters in New York and L.A. The latest Ghibli animated film From Up on Poppy Hill expanded from 24 to 40 theaters and averaged a modest $3,350 per venue.

 

Check back next week to see if the horror comedy sequel Scary Movie 5 or the inspirational Jackie Robinson biopic 42 can challenge for box office supremacy.