The real surprise of the weekend was that a movie in which The Rock stars as a Greek demigod famed for slaying giant monsters would turn out to be the pragmatic buzzkill. And yet, the Brett Ratner-directed reimagining, like Hercules himself, tried selling audiences on the legend, with a trailer that found Dwayne Johnson slaughtering and wearing as many animals as he could find, suggesting that its $29 million take was the result of moviegoers rejecting what they believed to be the digital lie of yet another generic, CGI swords-and-sandals epic. It’s an open question as to whether more would have come had they known Hercules actually subverts that notion, revealing Hercules to be just a regular guy who works out a lot and has daddy issues. But it seems clear that Johnson is now standing before a mirror, sadly boxing away the animal hats he might have worn for a sequel.
Elsewhere, the myth that sixtysomething actors can maintain their dignity in a romantic comedy was severely tested by the widower-meet-cute And So It Goes for an eighth-place, $4.5 million debut. Meanwhile, the sad-in-different-ways A Most Wanted Man helped audiences through their own grief over Philip Seymour Hoffman, with the John Le Carré thriller landing an impressive tenth-place finish of $2.7 million in just 361 theaters. That was a much better per-screen average than The Fluffy Movie, in which comedian Gabriel Iglesias undertook the Seven Labours of making broadly popular stand-up comedy for $3,042 per each of its 432 theaters.
But the weekend’s biggest per-screen hit was Magic In The Moonlight, besting Boyhood—which remains a summer sleeper, with $16,121 per each of its newly expanded, 107 screens—to take in $426,000 in 17 theaters, for a per-screen average of $25,059. It seems the belief that Woody Allen’s personal scandals would keep audiences away from his movies may have been the weekend’s biggest myth.
For more detailed numbers, visit Box Office Mojo.
