your box office explained

Your Box Office Explained: Rango Conquers All

This Weekend’s Winners: Rango ($38 million); The Adjustment Bureau ($20.9 million)

This Weekend’s Losers: Beastly $10.1 million and Take Me Home Tonight ($3.5 million)

How It All Went Down: Equal parts Chuck Jones and Chuck Norris, Gore Verbinski’s animated nod to the spaghetti Western hardly seems appropriate for the youngest of kids, but that hasn’t stopped parents from loading the minivan anyway. And if you think Rango is cleaning up now, when just 3 percent of kids are on spring break, imagine how it’s going to be doing in two weeks’ time when a third of all schools are on vacation.

Meanwhile, despite Universal’s inexact marketing of The Adjustment Bureau as an action movie, the film still managed to connect with that most-difficult-to-reach demographic: the American Woman Over the Age of 25. Thanks to word of mouth on its romantic underpinnings, more than half (53 percent) of the Adjustment audience was the fairer sex, and three-quarters were over the age of 30.

Elsewhere, while the box-office results were not ugly for Alex Pettyfer, they weren’t particularly impressive, either: CBS Films’ cheapie weepie, Beastly, a $17 million adaptation of Alex Flinn’s 2007 novel of the same name, did what was expected of it, which was to overwhelmingly connect with young women and almost no one else: Almost 80 percent of its audience were females under the age of 25, but at that budget, no one at CBS much cares.

Finally, Topher Grace’s Take Me Home Tonight (originally titled Kids in America) had a hard row to hoe, as it was aimed squarely at the post-college crowd, which doesn’t have much free time or discretionary income even in the best of times. Sure enough, more than half (55 percent) of its audience was under age 25, but Take Me Home Tonight didn’t even crack the top ten, which means at this rate, Relativity will be lucky to recoup its $10 million acquisition fee.

Your Box Office Explained: Rango Conquers All