American Sniper stayed on top for the third straight weekend, taking in $31 million to set a Super Bowl weekend record (the previous high was the Miley Cyrus concert movie back in 2008). Sniper's total now comes to $249 million, seemingly still on track to beat Guardians of the Galaxy and Hunger Games for the highest grossing movie of 2014, and now the biggest war movie ever, beating Saving Private Ryan, which grossed $216 million in 1998. In second place was Paddington with $8.5 million, which has held quite well since it came out, probably because of the lack of family film alternatives in theaters recently.
A close third was the time-traveling movie Project Almanac, which I have to admit I'd never even heard of before today. Whatever this movie was, it suffered from a lack of advertizing and poor reviews (36% on Rotten Tomatoes), while the Kevin Costner drama Black or White came in fourth, with $6.5 million (that also got bad reviews, coming in at just 33%). Rounding out the top five was J-Lo's The Boy Next Door, which earned $6 million for a $24 million total.
Top 5:
- American Sniper- $31.9 million
- Paddington- $8.5 million
- Project Almanac- $8.5 million
- Black or White- $6.5 million
- The Boy Next Door- $6.1 million
In limited release, the Oscar movies held pretty well, as Birdman sees its total gross come to $33 million, The Theory of Everything hit $30 million, and Boyhood pushed past $25 million. But boy do the producers of next month's Oscars show have to happy about American Sniper's box office success, considering the low totals of most of the nominees this year. Next weekend it's the Wachowski siblings' long delayed Jupiter Ascending, which looks set to be a disaster on an epic level, but it's competing for that title with the Jeff Bridges sorcery movie Seventh Son, so we'll see which one has a leg up with next year's Razzie nominations there. Happy Super Bowl Sunday everybody and go Seahawks!!!
