Easter Weekend Box Office: Transcendence Fails to Transcend, A Haunted House 2 Condemned

Steve Barton   |  

Apr 20, 2014

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It’s Easter weekend 2014, and unfortunately for Johnny Depp, the only Transcendence audiences were interested in was Heaven Is for Real while Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Rio 2 laughed all the way to the bank as they scared up more money than A Haunted House 2.

With comic book superheroes, 3D animated birds, and a kid who took The Sixth Sense to a whole new level by seeing not just dead people but also where they live ruling the top 3 slots at the box office, Johnny Depp’s fourth consecutive box office dud, Transcendence, flopped into 4th place.

The pricey science fiction thriller earned scathing critical reviews, poor audience word-of-mouth, and worst of all, a paltry $11.15 million opening. According to Box Office Mojo, even Stealth opened higher. That’s pretty bad. Pretty bad for Warner Bros, that is, who produced the film. Depp can surely drown the woes of his currently floundering film career in the comforts of his vast fortune, privately owned island, and Amber Heard. I wouldn’t feel too sorry for him just yet.

Maybe they could have just re-released The Lawnmower Man in 3D and saved everyone a lot of money?

Then there’s the sequel nobody wanted to the film even the people who enjoyed the original weren’t exactly all that enthusiastic about… Marlon Wayans’ A Haunted House 2 was condemned to 5th place and only $9.1 million, roughly half the original’s $18.1 million opening a year ago. The question now remains: Will there be a third installment, and if so, will David Zucker be brought in to replace the Wayans yet again?

Meanwhile, last week’s horror offering Oculus dropped over 50% to 8th place with $5.3 million. That brings it up to $21 million in two weeks. Art-house fare Under the Skin (in its third week of release) and The Raid 2 (with one extra week under its belt) earned $467,000 and $411,000 for respectable cumes of approximately $1.1 million and $2.3 million, respectively.

Next weekend brings a new horror offering in the form of The Quiet Ones, which I have been assured is not actually a prequel to The Apparition despite appearing to be based on the exact same experiment. Also, Paul Walker rises from the grave to do parkour in the Americanized remake Brick Mansions.

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