Culture

'Ready Player One' more-than-ready atop box office

April 02, 2018 00:11·
Avatars in a virtual reality world participate in a scavenger hunt for a priceless object in

Avatars in a virtual reality world participate in a scavenger hunt for a priceless object in"Ready Player One. Warner Brothers

"Ready Player One", rated PG-13 and produced by a team that included Donald De Line, Kristie Macosko Krieger and Bruce Berman, was the first movie directed by Mr. Spielberg to arrive in the less-competitive spring since "The Sugerland Express" in 1974.

Unveiling the film at SXSW ended up being a smart move, as the film has since enjoyed a wave of positive word of mouth that has continued to this weekend with a 76 percent Rotten Tomatoes score and an A- from audiences on CinemaScore.

At the specialty box office, Isle of Dogs earned $2.8 million for a theater average of $17,030, the best average of the weekend. With a $175 million budget, "RP1" will need that good word of mouth to keep it afloat at the box office through April. Tyler Perry's "Acrimony" opened this week as well, giving thriller fans an alternative to the sci-fi epic.

At third place, "Black Panther" pulled in $11.3 million, bringing its cumulative total to $650.7 million in the U.S. and Canada. This week, it will pass the $1.277 billion made by "Frozen" to become one of the top ten highest grossing films of all time. In that market, its three-day weekend should yield $9.2 million with a cumulative total of $89.6 million.

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Meanwhile, Marvel's "Black Panther" continues its record-breaking streak, taking in $7.7 million internationally in its seventh weekend. That's a new studio record for Roadside Attractions, passing the $47.6 million it earned a year ago for the Oscar-winning "Manchester By The Sea". Ready Player One is also doing brisk business overseas, grossing an estimated $128 million in 62 territories this weekend, including $61.7 million in China. A Light in Darkness' debut will fall short of both the original God's Not Dead, which opened to $9.2 million in 2014, and God's Not Dead 2, which opened to $7.6 million two years later. It even fell below Affirm's "Paul, Apostle of Christ", which finished tenth this weekend with $3.5 million from 1,493 locations.

The effects-laden picture took in $41.2 million in USA and Canadian cinemas over the extended Easter weekend, researcher ComScore Inc. estimated Sunday in an email, easily topping last weekend's leader, "Pacific Rim Uprising", which collected $9.2 million in ticket sales and fell to fifth place.

Set 10 years after "Pacific Rim", which hit screens in 2013, "Uprising" follows a new generation of pilots of the first film's giant "Jaeger" military mechanoids - fending off enormous Kaiju monsters aiming to end humanity.

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