Weekend Box Office Results for March 2-4, 2012

Weekend Box Office Results for March 2-4, 2012 - Box Office Mojo

The Lorax tore it up! It was expected to gross in the mid 40s and ended up with $70m, including a $31m Saturday. That was good enough to make #3 of all time among March openings (possibly #2 when the final numbers are tallied, because the preliminary estimate shows it only $185,000 behind the current #2 film.) It was the sixth-best opening ever for an animated film, and four of the films that beat it were sequels. Excluding the sequels, the all-time best was the Simpsons Movie, which wasn't much higher than The Lorax at $74M. Its investors got another bit of good news when moviegoers awarded the film a CinemaScore of A, indicating that word of mouth should drive the film to even greater heights.

Project X also performed fairly well as counter-seasonal programming. It took in about $21m, which actually seems to be the record for an R-rated comedy released in March. Going through the list of R-rated films, I discovered that the top March comedy before this weekend was Analyze This with $18.4M - and that was a long time ago! This sucker will also make some money for its investors, because it was made for a modest $12M, and received a CinemaScore of B+ from men, indicating that it may have some legs among the 18-29 crowd. (For the record, women did not like it, so go with your bro, not your ho.)