Weekend Box Office (11.24.14) — “Mockingjay” Fails to Ignite a Box Office Revolution

by: Madelyn Glymour | Contributor

Disaster! Catastrophe! Ruin! Mockingjay pulled in a measly $123 million this weekend, several million south of even the most conservative projections, and 22 percent below the opening of its predecessor Catching Fire. Truly, it is the end of days.

Anyway, despite its abject poverty, Mockingjay still scored the highest opening weekend of the year (well above Transformers: Age of Extinction‘s $100 million), and barring divine intervention, will retain that title. There’s a lot of speculation as to why, exactly, Mockingjay underperformed — it’s the least-liked book in the series, it didn’t open in IMAX, it received some lackluster reviews — and there’s some validity to them all. But to be perfectly honest, it’s been a low-grossing year generally, and in some ways, Mockingjay‘s underwhelming performance is par for the course.

Elsewhere in the top 5, we have Big Hero 6 hanging on to second place, and Interstellar leap-frogging over Dumb and Dumber To to reclaim third. The Dumb and Dumber sequel was gutted in its second week, dropping 61 percent to just under $14 million. In this case, you probably can blame the reviews, as well as bad word-of-mouth. Finally, Gone Girl clung to life, like a horror movie villain, for the eighth week running, just barely eeking out a fifth place finish over the second week of Beyond the Lights.

Be sure to check in on Thursday for our official predictions, as Horrible Bosses 2 and Penguins of Madagascar debut — and Gone Girl falls out of the top five, really, I swear, I mean it this time.