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Watchmen Breaks 2009 Box Office Numbers
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by Rob Walker | March 9, 2009 at 05:53 am
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The movie Watchmen boasted the biggest opening weekend of 2009 so far, but failed to surpass the success of Zack Snyder's previous movie 300. Watchmen raked in about $55.7m, which fell short of Warner Bros. estimated $60 million anticipated launch.
However, being a graphic novel niche movie, I suspect Watchmen will more than make up for its opening weekend on the back end. I wouldn't be surprised to see DVD sales of Watchmen hit record numbers when it is released.
Some critics argue that Watchmen's long run time, over two and a half hours, hurt the movie's box office figures. Many theatres were sold out but could only get one showing in the evening because of the length of the film.
The comic book adaptation about a team of retired, flawed superheroes took $55.7m (£39.8m) - the biggest opening weekend of 2009 so far.However it fell short of the $60m-plus (£42.8m) range expected by Warner Bros.
Superhero epic Watchmen led the weekend box office but stopped short of peaks hit by some of its predecessors.
Early sales reports showed Watchmen had more viewers on opening night than Snyder's 300, taking in $4.6 million on Thursday night. NowPublic member Manny Castro has that story:
The numbers for Watchmen's midnight screening have been released and the movie grossed $4.6 million from 1,595 of the 3,611 theaters screening it that had a showing. By comparison, director Zack Snyder's previous movie 300 made $2.5 million from it's midnight shows. That movie's opening weekend gross was $70.9 million.
We've got a couple of reviews up already from Manny Castro and NP'er Tomitheos on the site:
Director and visionary Zack Snyder took that challenge and has successfully triumphed under that pressure as he turned Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' brilliant comics series into a 'must see' sci-fi superhero movie!
The same everyday problems are still around. And, superheroes, although they exist, can't do anything about it. Nixon banned them from service. So, it's almost as if they don't exist.
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (1)
at 06:02 on March 9th, 2009
This also happened with Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet. Though 4 hours long, it still performed well, though audiences couldn't all make it to opening weekend. My local cinema at the time could only show it twice a day at the most.