Box Office Aftermath: ‘The Purge’ Invades the Summer Movie Season

Rounding out the weekend of June 7-9, 2013, The Purge intruded between the summer blockbusters, leaving the box office battlefield victorious. Box Office Aftermath is an ongoing column dedicated to recapping the weekend’s total ticket sales. Each week, combatants enter the cinematic war zone, bloodthirsty for your cash. But there can only be one true winner. In Box Office Aftermath, we will take a look at the numbers, how previous contenders fared, and provide a brief analysis of the results.

To many’s surprise, The Purge did gangbusters this past weekend running away with a total gross of $34.05 million in domestic box office ticket sales. I kind of figured that this film would stand a chance against the summer blockbuster titans due to the social media buzz, but no one ever predicted it would earn this much. When The Strangers came out in 2008, the home invasion thriller was able to take in $20.9 million its first weekend. But Twitter was not a huge influencer back then and the concept of the movie wasn’t that bizarre. I’m sure Universal Pictures and Platinum Dunes are please with themselves on their $3 million dollar budget movie. Now let’s hope they make a prequel to give us a better idea about The Purge. (Check out The Purge movie review.)

With a more quieter weekend, the box office figures fell 10 percent over all, but still remained strong with so many options in theaters. The other big debut this weekend, The Internship entered the summer movie season embarrassingly with a whopping $17.32 million, coming in fourth. With a budget of $58 million, whatever star power Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson once had must have fizzled out. The concept and story of the movie was also pretty bad too. (Check out The Internship movie review.)

Dropping one spot was Fast & Furious 6 shockingly, earning $19.62 million. Fast 6 has now passed the $200 million mark domestically, and is only the second movie this summer to do so, next to Iron Man 3. The movie’s domestic gross takeaway dropped 44 percent, which isn’t terrible, but still it’s puzzling how a genre thriller was able to overcome a big behemoth as Fast 6.

Now You See Me also dropped one spot to third, almost besting Fast 6 with a $19.04 million haul. Curious to think why people are so interested in the film with how mixed the reviews are, standing at 48 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. It must be the heavy lifting from the cast. Morgan Freeman‘s back must be hurting after all these years .

And capping off the top five is Epic still drawing in the family crowd, earning $11.87 million. Comparatively, it is now here near the success that The Croods had, which is still hanging in the top 15 and was actually able to turn profits up this weekend by almost nine percent. In its third weekend, The Croods was able to score $20 million.

Making room fore more summer movies to come, Star Trek Into Darkness ($11.42 million), Iron Man 3 ($5.75 million), and The Great Gatsby ($4.22 million) each lost over 400 theaters this weekend. I’m actually in disbelief that Star Trek was bested by Epic.

After Earth, in its second weekend fell four spots to number seven right above The Hangover Part III. The film gained $10.71 million to its pot, but it will be hard-pressed to believe it will make back its $130 million budget. And over seas, it isn’t fairing any better, even with the star power of Will Smith. It must not run in the family.

And for anyone that believes in love, Before Midnight took a respectable $526 thousand in only 50 theaters. Expect it to expand further this weekend.

(Click the image below to enlarge the chart. All figures are domestic box office.)