Weekend Box Office: “End of Watch” takes #1

Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña star in David Ayer's "End of Watch," which tied "House at the End of the Street" for the top slot at the box office this weekend.As I predicted in this week’s Box Office Beat, Open Road’s cop film “End of Watch” did much better than most prognosticators expected, with receipts of $13m, and took the top slot on the chart for the weekend. It technically tied for first with Relativity’s horror-film-in-marketing-only (as our Timothy Semenza called it), “House at the End of the Street,” which stars “Hunger Games” actress Jennifer Lawrence. But horror films are notoriously overestimated because of steep Sunday drops, whereas “End of Watch” should perform in line with its estimate, meaning that the smart money is on the latter to be the out-and-out winner when the actuals are released tomorrow.

The Clint Eastwood-starrer “Trouble with the Curve” was right behind those two films, with $12.7m, and could still feasibly win the weekend in the actuals. That’s a soft number for any Eastwood project, but the baseball genre has never been a big box office draw. Also somewhat soft after last weekend’s dynamo performance in LA/NY exclusive release–but still strong when considering that it’s essentially an art-film–was Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master,” which earned $5m. That’s about as well as Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood” did in its first expansion of this size, but that was after weeks of platforming, with already $10m in the till. You never know what Oscar nominations could do for “The Master,” but it now doesn’t seem like the movie will gross more than $20-25m. Again, that’s nothing to snuff at for this avante-garde a work, but it’s not nearly as big as the early hype suggested.

Check out the full top 10 chart below…

No. Title Weekend Per Theater Average Total
1 “End of Watch” $13.0M $4,762 $13.0M
1 “House at the End of the Street” $13.0M $4,217 $13.0M
3 “Trouble with the Curve” $12.7M $3,960 $12.7M
4 “Finding Nemo 3-D” $9.4M $3,253 $30.0M
5 “Resident Evil: Retribution” $6.7M $2,221 $33.5M
6 “Dredd” $6.3M $2,514 $6.3M
7 “The Master” $5.0M $6,345 $6.1M
8 “The Possession” $2.6M $1,012 $45.7M
9 “Lawless” $2.3M $888 $34.5M
10 “ParaNorman” $1.7M $1,421 $52.6M

Source: Box Office Mojo