'American Sniper' Has a Super Super Bowl Weekend, New Releases Not So Much

Super Bowl weekend doesn't tend to be a particularly good one for movies, but American Sniper has shown yet again that it doesn't care much for existing records. Its $31.85 million weekend haul is the highest-grossing for a Super Bowl weekend ever, beating out the $31.1 million earned by 2008's Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour--which, by the way, earned that amount on its opening weekend. For Sniper, this was its fourth in wide release. So far, it's earned $248.9 million, though the 51% drop from last week doesn't look good for its continued box office dominance.

The Loft

This weekend, though, it had no trouble, as the three new wide releases all flopped. Found footage time travel flick Project Almanac made only $8.5 million in 2,893 theatres, enough to put it in spot number three behind Paddington (weekend gross: $8.5 million; total gross: $50.5 million). Kevin Costner and Octavia Spencer's Black or White landed at number four with a gross of $6.4 million in 1,823 theatres. And The Loft, this weekend's biggest disappointment, couldn't even crack the top five--its $2.8 million in 1,841 theatres barely let it squeak into number ten spot. The number five movie was Jennifer Lopez's erotic thriller The Boy Next Door (weekend gross: $6 million, total gross: $24.6 million), which dropped off nearly 60 percent from its debut last weekend.

After five weeks in limited release, J.C. Chandor's A Most Violent Year expanded to 818 theatres and saw its box office increase to $1.7 million, for a total so far of $3.1 million. New in limited release, Chinese action comedy Running Man and Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee Timbuktu earned $205,000 and $50,000, respectively. And the theatrical release of two episodes of "Game of Thrones" made $1.5 million on 205 IMAX screens, enough to land it at spot number 15. It's not a ton of money, but the amount that Warner Bros. and HBO needed to pay for marketing was low, so, as far as theatrical exhibition experiments go, it seems to have been a successful one.