Weekend Box Office: ‘The Night Before’ Underperforms, Julia Roberts Thriller Bombs
"'The Night Before' and 'The Secrets in Their Eyes' Underwhelm at the Box Office"
In box office news from this weekend, audiences ran to see the final installment of the
Hunger Games franchise and… not much else, despite the wide release of two major films with all-star casts. According to
Forbes, both Sony’s
The Night Before and STX Entertainment’s
The Secrets in Their Eyes opened to little fanfare and failed to beat performances from last two of last weeks’ box office holdovers,
Spectre and
The Peanuts Movie.
The Night Before, the $25 million dollar R-rated comedy starring Seth Rogan, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Anthony Mackie, only earned $10.1 million dollars for fourth place, which is not terrible, but not a good sign that it will play well into December. Recent holiday hits such as
Elf, The Grinch and
Bad Santa opened in November and continued to perform well into Christmas, and Sony is hoping for a similar run for the
Night Before.
The Secret in Their Eyes is a remake of the Academy Award winning Argentinian thriller starring Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, and Chiwetel Ejofor which also opened this Friday. Again, despite an acclaimed all-star cast, the film only opened to a paltry $6.63 million despite only costing $19.5 million dollars to produce.
The weekend returns from both
The Night Before and
The Secret in Their Eyes is an unfortunate reminder that star power is not a guaranteed box office win these days. Despite a winter release, usually reserved for films that desire Oscar contention, 'Secrets' received mediocre reviews and did not receive much television promotion. With help of some positive word of mouth and some positive reviews,
The Night Before could possibly hold up over the next few weeks.