Weekend Box Office: X-Men carries on without Wolverine, viewers

By Scott Tobias | June 6, 2011 | 2:46pm

Aux Features Film

Despite generally kind reviews and a weekend clear of any other first-week contenders, X-Men: First Class took a middling (by mega-movie standards) $56 million, making it the lowest attended movie of the series and a big dropoff from the $81 million collected by X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the $122.9 million hauled by X-Men: The Last Stand. Put those numbers on a graph and you can ski down it. It’s possible that the absence of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine explains the low number, but it seems equally likely that X-Men: First Class is paying for the sins of the two previous movies, which may have been immediately successful, but weren’t terribly well-liked. Good word-of-mouth for this film may then bode well for future entries; if audiences can trust the X-Men series to be good again, maybe they’ll be more willing to reinvest in the series. (Then again, maybe viewers were just taking a breather after the moviegoing orgy that was Memorial Day weekend. The Hangover 2, for one, experienced a 62% drop.)

In limited release, Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris and Terrence Malick’s The Tree Of Life continued to clean up in their third and second weeks, respectively, with the Woodman landing in eighth with $2.9 million on only 147 screens and Malick again scoring the highest per screen average of all comers with $31,050 per screen on 20 screens. Of the openers, the well-regarded drama Beginners did well out of the gate, with $27,000 on five screens, though had it been released later in the year, perhaps the Christopher Plummer-related Oscar buzz might have given it more of a lift. Also kindly received, Submarine performed well with $10,200 per screen on four screens, but at $4,000 per screen on four screens, Beautiful Boy proved a tough sell, as a drama about the marital fallout from school shooting might be.