Weekend Box Office: RoboCop Not Quite the Future of Law Enforcement He Used to Be
Steve Barton
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Box Office Mojo
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The President’s Day Weekend box office was a big one for 80’s remakes, but it was only really big for one particular 1980’s reboot. Unfortunately for the new RoboCop, that reboot was About Last Night.
MGM’s controversial remake of the 1987 classic RoboCop tried to get a jump on the Valentine’s (Fri)Day openings of romantic reboots of About Last Night and Endless Love by bowing on Wednesday, February 12th, only to be met with considerably less than enthusiastic box office. The numbers got a little better as the weekend played out.
The good news for the remake is that the international box office has been strong (it was No. 1 in 15 out of 24 markets). But here in America all the $100 million redux could muster was a third place, $21.5 million opening weekend. To put that into perspective, that’s half a million less than the 2012 President’s Day weekend opening of Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. As far as needless remakes of Paul Verhoeven films go, RoboCop even fell several million below the opening of the Total Recall remake.
Perhaps instead of changing RoboCop’s partner from a white female to an African-American male, they should have cast a black male for the lead, preferably Kevin Hart. His About Last Night, a remake of a mostly forgotten 80’s romantic comedy that starred Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, and Jim Belushi, crushed the future of law enforcement with $27 million. At least RoboCop can say it did better than the $13 million opening of a remake of a 1981 Brooke Shields romantic drama that sucked the first time around (Endless Love).
Though not really a horror movie, Winter’s Tale does feature Russell Crowe as an evil agent of Lucifer in a bowler’s hat who makes a living crushing miracles and murdering waiters who fail to properly pan-fry owls to his liking. Did I mention Will Smith plays Lucifer? It’s the movie where Pegasus shows up to help a Highlander fall in love, battle the devil, and cure cancer. It’s… It’s truly something to behold, all right. Winter’s Tale flopped hardest of all with only $7 million for the weekend. Had it only included musical numbers, it could have been this generation’s Xanadu.
Next week sees the eruption of Paul W.S. Anderson’s Brundlefly-ing of Gladiator and Titanic into a single film that he then blows up with a volcano. It’s Voltanic, I mean Pompeii. Something tells me The Lego Movie will remain number one for a third week in a row.
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