Weekend Box Office: Sucker Punch too awesome for audiences
There’s an old rule among dramatists that you don’t give the audience what it wants, you give it what it needs. Perhaps that explains the failure of Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, a movie that plays like a Comic-Con showreel of awesome stuff—Dragons! Schoolgirls! Nazi Robot Monsters!—but couldn’t find any critical defenders or much of an audience. At $19 million, Sucker Punch earned enough to debut in second place, but fell short of the $24.4 million made by the sequel Diary Of A Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules, a kid-comedy produced on roughly one-fourth the budget. Fueled by Jeff Kinney’s popular book series, Wimpy Kid actually improved slightly on the $22.1 million posted by the first entry in its opening weekend, all but guaranteeing more sequels down the line. There was good news, too, for last week’s openers Limitless and The Lincoln Lawyer, both of which lost very little business—19.5% and 16.7% down, respectively—on their second weekend, owing to steady business from older audiences.