Weekend Box-Office: September 21-23, 2012

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

House at the End of Watch?

It was a reasonably quiet weekend at the box office, and four new wide releases wrestled for the attention of the few who ventured out to theaters.

At the moment there appears to be no clear “winner” (but one definite loser), and we won’t know who’s really at the top until tomorrow when the actual figures are counted. But it will likely come down to a matter of a few thousand bucks, as today’s estimates have both the Jennifer Lawrence thriller HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET and the Jake Gyllenhaal/Michael Pena cop movie END OF WATCH tied at #1 with an unexceptional $13 million.

Relativity was undoubtedly hoping for a more sizeable chunk of THE HUNGER GAMES’ audience to visit the HOUSE, but Katniss fans obviously weren’t that interested in domestic terror. Still, the movie (which the actress shot before her time in Panem) cost less than $10 million, as did the latest R-rated LA police story from writer-director David Ayer (TRAINING DAY, HARSH TIMES, STREET KINGS).

But don’t count out Clint Eastwood! The cinema veteran (and recent improv furniture conversationalist) and his new film TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE were in a close second with $12.7 million — and could conceivably be at the top tomorrow when the more accurate numbers are released. And while the baseball-themed family drama didn’t start strong, keep in mind that Eastwood’s last starring role GRAN TORINO (which, unlike CURVE, he also directed) ended up with nearly $150 million.

Despite some creative use of 3D and a tone that stayed truer to the character’s comic origins than the Stallone version, DREDD 3D got kicked into the gutters of Mega City One, opening to just $6.3 million — less than half of what the week’s other new releases made. Buzz from Comic Con couldn’t help the Law, and now it doesn’t seem like we’ll ever get to see Dredd face off against Judge Death on the big screen…

Of last week’s entries, the 3D reissue of FINDING NEMO treaded water in fourth place, better than RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION, which took a fairly standard genre dive of 68% in its second weekend. Filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson’s THE MASTER, which made an impact last week at just five locations, got pushed out onto nearly 800 screens and came up with a cool $5 million (and the highest per-screen average in the Top 10).

Dropping from sight this week were THE BOURNE LEGACY, THE ODD LIFE OF TIMOTHY GREEN and THE EXPENDABLES 2 (which at $82M seems unlikely to ever reach nine figures domestically). And for those still keeping track of the Batman, THE DARK KNIGHT RISES has edged past SHREK 2 to take the #7 spot on the all-time domestic box office list with $443.1M.

Next weekend brings the Joseph Gordon-Levitt/Bruce Willis time-travel action movie LOOPER, the computer-animated monster tale HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA, the inspirational drama WON’T BACK DOWN, and (in limited release) the girl-group comedy PITCH PERFECT.

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