Despite having being made for a third of the original’s budget and being mostly set in a cut-rate future where the characters are continually shuttling between the same handful of one-room sets, the John Cusack-free Hot Tub Time Machine 2 somehow failed to entice moviegoers this Oscar weekend. Opening in seventh place, the movie—the half-assed Back To The Future Part II to Hot Tub Time Machine’s half-baked Back To The Future, only with Biff Tannen as the protagonist—made a measly $5.8 million. That’s still more than Mortdecai, but suggests that viewers just weren’t that interested in ball-swelling nanobots (pictured above), virtual reality sexual coercion game shows, and the rest of the high-tech gay panic and castration anxiety that our future has to offer.
No, America prefers its implicitly reactionary sex stuff to be present-day and between a man and a woman, and the man should be wearing a tie. Fifty Shades Of Grey and Kingsman once again took first and second place at the top of the box office, though both experienced significant drop-offs; Fifty Shades’ 73 percent drop is actually one of the steepest ever for a super-saturated wide release, though it doesn’t seem all that significant once you remember that the movie—budgeted at a modest-by-Hollywood-standards $40 million—has managed to make $410 million worldwide in just ten days.
Overall, it was a slow, sleepy weekend, capped off with the agonizing suspense of the Oscars, where millions of Americans tuned in to see which celebrity would look most annoyed at having to play along with Neil Patrick Harris’ overlong magic act banter shtick. (If you guessed Robert Duvall, you’re wrong, because Duvall outright refused to make eye contact, thereby forfeiting the prize.) The week’s other major new releases, the Kevin Costner sports drama McFarland, USA and the teen comedy The DUFF, made modest-but-respectable debuts, earning around $11 million apiece.
For more detailed numbers, visit Box Office Mojo.