Weekend Box Office Results for June 3-5, 2011

Weekend Box Office Results for June 3-5, 2011

X-Men First Class had the weakest performance from the X-Men franchise, despite the best reviews! (Actually tied for the series best with X-Men 2 at 88%). Here's what Box Office Mojo wrote about X-Men First Class's $56m opening:

"The debut of another fanboy fantasia, Watchmen, could be a comparison to First Class. Both were ensemble period pieces and both had exceptionally high results in Box Office Mojo's 'when will you see it' polling that didn't translate to correspondingly high grosses.

Distributor 20th Century Fox's exit polling indicated that 58 percent of X-Men: First Class's audience was male and 54 percent was over 25 years old. That means First Class skewed more male than Wolverine (53 percent). The hope now is for First Class to hold well moving forward, but that's unlikely, given the history of the franchise and the genre. The previous X-Men movies all flamed out after their first weekends, including the supposed good ones (X2 and the first X-Men). If First Class holds as well as the first X-Men and X2, that would give it a final gross range of $141 million to $162 million (Wolverine closed with $179.9 million)."

In other news, Hangover II dropped a steep 62%, but still held on to plenty ($32 million), and was easily able to stay in second place, given the absence of competition. (X-men was the only new film in wide release.) That was a disappointment. The first Hangover film had great word-of-mouth and dropped only 27% in its second weekend, but this version is obviously not the beneficiary of similar audience-based marketing.