Weekend Box Office: Shockingly, a Marvel movie makes some money

By A.A. Dowd | November 11, 2013 | 5:40pm

Aux Features Newswire

Fans of Thor, The Avengers, Greek mythology, 2 Broke Girls, Fabio, green screens, Lars Von Trier, Game Of Thrones, superhero films with the word dark in their titles, mallets, monsters, post-credits sequences, Filipino singers, and body-building heavy-metal singers assembled this weekend to make the new Marvel movie, Thor: The Dark World, No. 1 at the box-office. The autumn blockbuster, which basically functions as a sequel to two running franchises, made $86.1 million (or about eight times as much as the film right behind it on the charts, Jackass Senior). But before spinning that ancient copy of Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ’Em, while obnoxiously calling to insist their major-studio rivals “can’t touch this,” Disney execs should remember that $86.1 million is not even half of what the third Iron Man movie made back in May. In terms Marvel characters could understand, that’s barely enough to cover Tony Stark’s bar tab on a slow Saturday night. Still, the Thunder God has a whole second week to keep clobbering the Yancy Street Gang (did we do that right?), as there’s nothing major opening until Nov. 22, at which point Katniss Everdeen crashes Marvel’s parade.

Fighting for the runner-up spot like dogs for dinner scraps were Bad Grandpa ($11.3 million), Free Birds ($11.18 million), and Last Vegas ($11.1 million), while Ender’s Game rounded out the top five with just $10.2 million. Plummeting about 62 percent in its second week, the Orson Scott Card adaptation is looking less like a slight misfire and more like an outright flop. Few of the new indie releases made much of a dent either, because even art-house patrons love Tom Hiddleston, right? The only notable fluctuation was 12 Years A Slave, which stayed in seventh place but managed to add $6.6 million (from 734 new screens) to its tally. As all of modern cinema is slowly becoming a comic-book adaptation, let’s just assume that the film is doing well because it features one of the guys who plays Magneto and not because it’s fantastic.