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Furious 7 has earned more in just ten days in the domestic market than any other film in the franchise managed to make during its entire box office run as Furious 7’s current total of $252 million is well past Furious 6’s lifetime domestic tally ($239 million). Furious 7 is already demonstrating better "legs" than its predecessor, with a 58.8% second week drop versus Furious 6’s 64% decline. Backed by solid notices and good word-of-mouth Furious 7 is enjoying a run that will be very hard for Furious 8 to top. With no big action films set to drop until Avengers: Age of Ultron, Furious 7 has the rest of April pretty much to itself.
Furious 7 is already the highest-grossing film of 2015, and could potentially pass Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper (which should end its run around $350 million) to become the #1 box office film of 2014 and 2015, providing, of course, that Furious 7 isn’t itself eclipsed by Avengers: Age of Ultron, or the Hunger Games finale, or the new Star Wars film—but one thing is sure—all those films will face much more competition than Furious 7, whose clear path to success must have the schedulers at Universal chortling.
Of course in addition to its domestic success, Furious 7 is killing it overseas where it has so far earned 68.5% of its $800.5 million total. There is little doubt that Furious 7 will be joining the billion dollar club in the near future.
Meanwhile Dreamworks’ Home appears to be holding up nicely as the current “family film” of choice as it dropped just 29.7% in its third weekend, earning $19 million and bringing tits domestic total to $129.5 million. Most of the other films in the top ten suffered small declines, but those drops came from the anemic totals the movies managed to run up last week when Furious 7 sucked almost all the air out of the room.
This week’s lone bigtime newcomer was The Longest Ride, the 11th movie adapted from a Nicholas Sparks novel, and like those other ten films, The Longest Ride targets female viewers, who made up 73% of the audience. The Longest Ride, which stars Scott Eastwood (Clint’s son) and Britt Robertson, attracted an older crowd, with 43% of ticket buyers over 34, and 24% over 50. They gave the film an "A" CinemaScore, which bodes well for its prospects, as does the fact that the film has done well in Midwestern and mountain states, the very places that made the adaptation of Sparks’ novel The Notebook a sleeper hit in 2004. The next few weeks will tell if The Longest Ride will have anything like The Notebook’s box office staying-power.
Some smaller "art" movies made some noise near the bottom of the top ten this week. The Weinstein Company’s Woman in Gold, which stars Helen Mirren in a Nazi stolen art drama based on a true story, expanded to 1504 theaters and landed at #7, while Noam Baumbach’s While We’re Young finished at #10 despite being in just 246 theaters.
A24 Films, which released While We’re Young, also debuted Ex Machina, a new robot-themed science fiction film from Alex Garland, who wrote 28 Days Later. Opening in just 4 theaters in L.A. and New York, Ex Machina earned $249,956 for a $62,489 average—the best so far this year for a film in limited release.
Be sure to check back here next week as a quartet of new films open including the comedy sequel Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, the Disney nature film Monkey Kingdom, the teen "found footage" cyber thriller Unfriended, and the Stalin-era detective thriller Child 44.
