The thriller about the capture of the terrorists behind the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing expanded wide to 3,120 screens in its fourth weekend, after an awards-season qualifying run on just seven screens. The team of star Mark Wahlberg and director Peter Berg was expecting the kind of all-American January hit they achieved four years ago with "Lone Survivor." So was the industry, which saw the film tracking at No. 1 in online sales this weekend at Fandango. Analysts expected the drama to make around $20 million this weekend.
Yet "Patriots Day" didn't even crack the top five, finishing instead in sixth place with an estimated $12.0 million. This suggests that the film will be lucky to recoup its reported $45 million budget plus a similar amount in marketing and distribution costs.
In fact, of the three new wide releases and three expanding-into-wide-release movies, only one finished in the top five. That was "The Bye Bye Man," a low budget horror movie with no stars, which nonetheless debuted with nearly twice the $7 million it was projected to earn. In fact, at an estimated $13.4 million, it's within $400,000 of both "Sing" and "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story," for a virtual three-way tie for third place. (Indeed, when final figures are released Tuesday, it could end up ahead of those holdover hits.)
How did this underdog succeed where Wahlberg and Berg's epic stumbled? Here are five ways.
That drama opened moderately well, at $20.2 million, but it topped out at $61.4 million, suggesting that viewers were already starting to tire of the formula before "Patriots Day" followed fast on "Horizon"'s heels.
Still, every little bit of positive buzz helps. Look at "La La Land," which scored a record seven Globe wins last Sunday. It jumped into second place this weekend, after six weeks of release, and earned an estimated $14.5 million, for a total of $74.1 million to date.
"Hidden Figures" showed its broad, cross-racial appeal last weekend when it edged out "Rogue One" for the top spot. Nonetheless, it should have been clear that young people weren't going to show up in great numbers for "Patriots Day" after the film's Thursday night preview. It's a given that older viewers aren't going to see a late-night Thursday movie but will wait for the weekend, but the Thursday take of just $560,000 indicated that young people weren't coming either.
Especially young women. Did you happen to catch Wahlberg's visit to "Conan" this week? The star's fellow Bostonian noted that it's been a quarter-century since Wahlberg went from pop star to Calvin Klein underwear model to movie leading man. These days, the pop star-turned-Klein skivvies model is Justin Bieber.
At 45, Wahlberg has aged well out of boy-band fan appeal, and the "Patriots" clip screened on "Conan" made him look not much younger than co-stars Kevin Bacon and John Goodman. As an aging action hero, he's not Liam Neeson yet, but he's getting there.
Jamie Foxx's crime thriller, "Sleepless," and Ben Affleck's nostalgic gangster picture, "Live by Night," chased the same viewers. Berg and Wahlberg can console themselves that their movie did a lot better than those rivals; "Sleepless" finished eighth with an estimated $8.5 million, while "Live by Night" was way down at No. 11 with an estimated $5.4 million.
Nonetheless, the studio went ahead with a costly 3,119-screen release, only to see the "Monster" flounder against holdover kid hits "Sing" and "Moana."
Given the movie's reported $125 million cost, it looks like the accountants' dismal predictions were correct. Compared to that belly flop, "Patriots Day's" weekend doesn't look so bad.
