Though it wasn’t able to match the debut of the first G.I. Joe movie or set a new Easter weekend box office record, John Chu’s G.I. Joe: Retaliation took the box office crown and performed solidly both at home and abroad with $41.2 million domestically and year’s best-to-date $80.3 million overseas.  Aided by the strong hold registered by Dreamworks’ The Croods and a solid debut by Tyler Perry’s thriller Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor, the Joe sequel helped Hollywood eke out a thin .3% gain over the same weekend last year when The Hunger Games topped the box office for a second straight week.  Meanwhile the teenage alien romance The Host disappointed in its debut in spite of the property’s Stephenie B. Meyer connection.

 

G.I. Joe: Retaliation’s solid opening came despite the fact that the first G.I. Joe film, though it did well at the box office, earned one of the audience lowest ratings ever for an action movie blockbuster.  Paramount was able to overcome the resistance to the property that had built up in response to the lousy first film in the franchise by changing the film’s focus to the character of "Roadblock" played by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who wasn’t in the first Joe movie and then adding action movie vet Bruce Willis to help with the older demographic.  Paramount pulled the film from its 2012 schedule for re-shoots as well as for a conversion to 3-D, which should help the movie overseas, and which actually accounted for a solid 45% of the opening weekend domestic gross.

 

Weekend Box Office (Studio Estimates): March 29-31, 2013
	Film	Weekend Gross	Screens	Avg./ Screen	Total Gross	Wk#
1	G.I. Joe: Retaliation	$41,200,000	3,719	$11,078	$51,707,000	1
2	The Croods	$26,500,000	4,065	$6,519	$88,618,000	2
3	Tyler Perry's Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor	$22,300,000	2,047	$10,894	$22,300,000	1
4	Olympus Has Fallen	$14,000,000	3,106	$4,507	$54,743,000	2
5	Oz The Great and Powerful	$11,605,000	3,324	$3,491	$198,278,000	4
6	The Host	$11,002,000	3,202	$3,436	$11,002,000	1
7	The Call	$4,800,000	2,439	$1,968	$39,480,000	3
8	Admission	$3,253,000	2,161	$1,505	$11,759,000	2
9	Spring Breakers	$2,758,000	1,379	$2,000	$10,100,000	3
10	The Incredible Burt Wonderstone	$1,300,000	1,575	$825	$20,580,000	3

 

As might be expected males (68%) made up the majority of the opening weekend G.I. Joe audience, and the crowd was on the older side with 59% over 25.  While it is premature to consider Retaliation a hit, it did manage a solid "A-" CinemaScore, and the film appears to be doing far better overseas than the first Joe movie, though the original did open better domestically with a 3-day total of $54.7 million.

 

Second place went to last week’s winner The Croods, which dropped just 39.3% as it earned an estimated $26.5 million.  So far The Croods appears to be tracking very much like Dreamwork’s How To Train Your Dragon, which earned $217.6 million domestically (and $277.3 million overseas) in 2010.

 

Tyler Perry’s Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor did even better than expected with an estimated $22.3 million from just over 2,000 theaters giving it a nearly identical per-venue average of $10,894 versus $11,078 for Joe.  Though Temptation is a sexy thriller rather than Perry’s usual cross-dressing comedies, the writer/director’s audience remains remarkably consistent.  Temptation drew a crowd that was 70% female and nearly 80% over 25--and they gave the film a solid "A-" CinemaScore.

 

Last week’s second place film Olympus Has Fallen also nabbed an "A-" CinemaScore, but it faced a buzz saw in G.I. Joe: Retaliation, which targeted the same action movie audience, so Olympus suffered a 54% drop as it earned an estimated $14 million, just ahead of Disney’s Oz: The Great and Powerful, which dropped to #5 in its fourth weekend as it earned an estimated $11.6 million.  This week Oz will become the first 2013 film to pass the $200 million mark domestically (it has already earned $214 million overseas).

 

This week’s other newcomer, The Host, is based on Stephenie (Twilight Saga) Meyer’s YA alien invasion romance novel.  While the novel sold well, it hasn’t spurred the devotion that the Twilight series did, and Meyer has yet to write a sequel.  The Host’s audience did mirror Twilight’s since it was 78% female and 61% under 25, but there just weren’t very many of them and they gave the film a lousy "B-" CinemaScore, which doesn’t bode well for the future.

 

The sleazy exploitative Spring Breakers movie stalled as it dropped 43% in spite of adding nearly 25% more theaters, while the high profile comedy, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone dropped to #10 during just its third weekend, and Warner Bros. expensive Jack the Giant Slayer tumbled out of the Top Ten.  The $200+ million feature will finish well south of $65 million domestically.

 

Check back next week to see if either the 3-D re-release of Jurassic Parkor the new souped-up version of Evil Dead will be able to make much of an impression on the box office.