Dragons Hold off Madea at the Weekend Box Office

Dreamworks Animation’s trilogy-capper How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World managed to hold steady with only a 45% drop to take the #1 spot at the box office for the second weekend in a row. The animated blockbuster took in just over $30 million for a domestic total of $97,696,275 and worldwide haul of $375,396,275 million worldwide so far. At this rate it could very well beat out the previous two, which took in $217 million and $177 million stateside, respectively.

Debuting at #2 and besting weekend expectations with $27 million was A Madea Family Funeral, writer/director/star Tyler Perry’s swan song as the title character. That’s the fourth best opening in the nine-film franchise, and had a far higher per-screen average than The Hidden World. If audience interest holds, the new film has a chance of beating out the highest-grossing entry, Madea Goes to Jail, which took in $90.5 million a decade ago in 2009.

Dropping a spot to #3 was the Robert Rodriguez-directed/James Cameron-produced sci-fi epic Alita: Battle Angel with $7 million, bringing its domestic total to $72 million. However, it took in another $40 million overseas, and with a worldwide take of over $350 million so far Alita could follow in the footsteps of genre movies like Warcraft and Pacific Rim that failed to catch fire Stateside but still eked out a profit thanks to foreign grosses. Whether that will be enough to give the film the sequel the filmmakers laid down so much track for in the first film is anyone’s guess.

The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part came in at #4 with $6.6 million for a domestic total of $91.6 million, and a worldwide cume of $152.7 million. Considering that 2014’s original LEGO Movie had taken in twice that ($183 million) by its own fourth week you are probably looking at a Warner Bros. very wary to commit to more brick-based movies. Whether this is franchise fatigue after The LEGO Batman Movie and The LEGO Ninjago Movie, or simply the failure to capture lightning in a bottle again is up for debate, but the grosses show that audiences are tiring of LEGO-based films.

Universal’s Best Picture-winner Green Book got a tremendous Oscar boost with $4.7 million, a 121.4% uptick from last weekend shooting it from #11 to #5 at the box office with the addition of 1,388 locations. The racial drama now stands at $75.9 million domestically and $188 million worldwide, an all-around win for the kind of character-based dramas that studios are rarely making these days.

Rounding out the Top Ten are the WWE biopic Fighting With My Family at #6 ($4.69 million weekend take for a $14.9 million domestic total), the Rebel Wilson comedy Isn’t It Romantic at #7 ($4.64 million weekend take for a $40.2 million domestic total), the Chloe Moretz/Isabelle Huppert thriller Greta from director Neil Jordan debuting at #8 with $4.58 million, the gender-swapped remake What Men Want at #9 ($2.7 million for a $49.6 million domestic total), and the Blumhouse horror sequel Happy Death Day 2U with $2.5 million weekend take for a $25.2 million domestic take and a $54.4 million worldwide total.

The highest per-screen average for the weekend came from A24’s Climax, the Gaspar Noe-directed dance horror flick starring Sofia Boutella, which debuted at #31 with an impressive $121,655 at 5 locations ($24,33 per theater) compared to How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World‘s $7,010 per-screen-average and A Madea Family Funeral‘s $11,077 per-screen-average.