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.
In limited release, two auteurs rode their reputations to solid business: François Ozon’s highly regarded Potiche earned $12,143 per screen on seven screens and Julian Schnabel’s Miral survived some tepid reviews to post $16,250 per screen on four screens. In its third week, the costume drama Jane Eyre continued to be the arthouse movie-of-the-moment, adding more screens in its third while still doing $11,000 per venue, enough to inch it near the $2 million mark.
For more detailed numbers, visit Box Office Mojo.