The Great Gatsby started off strong for Baz Luhrmann and crew as they pulled in a pretty strong $51 million debut in U.S. theaters. However, it wasn’t quite enough to catch up to Iron Man 3, which captured another $72.5 million. While both movies made around $19 million on Friday, Iron Man 3 had a huge Saturday which put it over the top for the second week in a row.
A lot of “experts” predicted The Great Gatsby to be around $45 million, so Luhrmann’s adaptation of the classic novel did break those barriers for a strong open. I was glad to see that people were going to the theater as I thought the film was pretty good. I’m not sure if everyone agrees with my take or not, but I’m glad that people still went to see it after a strong marketing campaign.
Gatsby is easily the biggest opening for a Lurhmann film, way ahead of Australia which opened at $14.8 million. The opening $51 million was about the entire domestic earnings from Moulin Rouge!, which was his biggest earner before The Great Gatsby.
As for Iron Man 3, it was a 60% drop from last weekend, but the blockbuster has raked in a total of $949 million which will most likely break the $1 billion by next weekend. I’m sure Shane Black and co. are still happy and bathing in the millions of dollars it has so far.
After a so-so start to the year, the last few weeks have been pretty good for movies. I particularly liked Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain, which didn’t do well at the box office, but critically I gave it a B. Iron Man 3, while it had many issues, overall it was still a good action piece which landed a B- for me. And to top it off, I extremely enjoyed The Great Gatsby, at which I graded it an A and is easily the best film of the year so far for me.
Hopefully the year will continue that trend and get better and better. Did you get a chance to see anything over the weekend?
