Divergent overcame weak reviews and triumphed at the weekend box office with an estimated $56 million opening.  Faced with a crowded marketplace stuffed with family films, Disney’s Muppets Most Wanted opened well below expectations with $16.5 million.  Overall the total of the top 12 films was up 2.5% from the same weekend last year when The Croods debuted with $46.3 million.  Meanwhile, overseas, Darren Aronofsky’s Biblical epic Noah, which opens here next weekend, earned $14 million in limited international debuts in Mexico and South Korea.
 
Divergent has apparently succeeded in establishing a new YA-based movie franchise, where a host of recent films such as The Host, The Mortal Instruments, Warm Bodies, and Beautiful Creatures have all failed.  The secret could lie in the popularity of the book series--Veronica Roth’s Divergent novels are white hot—though only 50% of the opening weekend audience for Divergent had read the book compared with 74% for Twilight and 76% for The Hunger Games. 
 
Divergent received lots of bad reviews (it currently has only a 41% positive rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes), largely because reviewers found the movie’s plot to be too much like that of The Hunger Games.  But opening weekend audiences for Divergent, which were predictably heavily female (69%) and surprisingly well-balanced in terms of age with 50% over 25, gave the movie a solid “A” CinemaScore. 
 
Bad reviews didn’t appear to make a difference with the opening weekend audience, but will they keep Divergent from attaining full Twilight and The Hunger Games status?  Possibly, though it is too early tell.  The first Twilight film debuted with $69.6 million in 2009, which is not that much bigger a bow than Divergent’s, but The Hunger Games’ $152.5 opening in 2013 is of a different order of magnitude.  The question now appears to be now whether Divergent will be a success or not, but how big a hit does YA specialist studio Summit Entertainment have on its hands?  How Divergent holds up at the domestic box office over the next few weeks, and how it fares overseas, where it won’t have much of a push until April 4, will determine how big a success the $85 million film will be.
 
Disney’s Muppets Most Wanted has received good reviews (77% positive on Rotten Tomatoes), but with Mr. Peabody & Sherman and The LEGO Movie still doing big business, there was just too much competition for the family audience.  The 2011 Muppets movie that re-established the franchise earned $29.1 million during its debut, but that was over the Thanksgiving holiday, a much more propitious slot for a family--oriented movie. The Muppets Most Wanted are unlikely to reach The Muppets’ domestic total of $88.6 million, but since it was produced for just $50 million, The Muppets Most Wanted still has a chance to make money if it does well overseas.
 

Weekend Box Office (Studio Estimates): March 21-23, 2014
	Film	Weekend Gross	Screens	Avg./ Screen	Total Gross	Wk#
1	Divergent	$56,000,000	3,936	$14,228	$56,000,000	1
2	Muppets Most Wanted	$16,514,000	3,194	$5,170	$16,514,000	1
3	Mr. Peabody & Sherman	$11,700,000	3,607	$3,244	$81,002,000	3
4	300: Rise of An Empire	$8,665,000	3,085	$2,809	$93,753,000	3
5	God's Not Dead	$8,564,000	780	$10,979	$8,564,000	1
6	Need for Speed	$7,781,000	3,115	$2,498	$30,404,000	2
7	The Grand Budapest Hotel	$6,750,000	304	$22,204	$12,961,000	3
8	Non-Stop	$6,346,000	2,945	$2,155	$78,621,000	4
9	The LEGO Movie	$4,115,000	2,501	$1,645	$243,352,000	7
10	Tyler Perry's The Single Moms Club	$3,100,000	1,896	$1,635	$12,910,000	2

Third place went to Dreamworks’ Mr. Peabody & Sherman, which dropped just 46.4% in its third weekend in theaters as it earned an estimated $11.7 million, bringing its domestic total to $81 million.  Mr. Peabody has earned $102.2 million overseas, but still has a long way to go to earn back its $145 million cost.
 
Legendary’s 300: Rise of an Empire dropped 54.9% in its third frame as it brought in $8.6 million and drove its domestic total to $93.8 million.  The $110 million production has done even better overseas where it has earned more than twice as much ($195.4 million) bringing its worldwide total to an already profitable $289.2 million.
 
The fifth spot went to the religiously-themed God is Not Dead, which earned an estimated $8.6 million from just 780 theaters for a solid $10,979 per-venue average.  It should be interesting to see if the Biblical epic Noah can tap into this same religious audience while also appealing to the mainstream with its spectacular effects and A-list cast.
 
The heavily-hyped road race film Need for Speed dropped 56.1% in its second weekend as it brought in an estimated $7.8 million to bring its domestic total to $30.4 million.  Once again this movie is going to have to make its money overseas where it has earned 76% of its worldwide total.
 
The seventh spot went to Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, which earned $6.8 million from just 304 theaters for a sparkling $22,204 average.
 
The LEGO Movie slipped to #9 in its seventh weekend in theaters as it earned $4.1 million, bringing its 2014 best-so-far total to $243 million.  Meanwhile Disney’s Frozen finally slipped out of the top ten in its 17th weekend of wide release.  With a domestic total of $397.7 million, Frozen will apparently end its domestic run right at the $400 million mark.
 
Check back next week to see in Darren Aronosfsky’s Noah, or the Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie Sabotage, or the horror comedy A Haunted House 2 can top the box office charts.