Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters got off to a modest start on Friday, though that was good enough for first place at the start of a quiet weekend at the box office. Meanwhile, Parker had a poor debut even by star Jason Statham's low standards, while Movie 43 is officially on its way to becoming one of the year's biggest bombs.
Hansel and Gretel opened to $6.025 million at 3,372 locations on Friday. That's a bit below last Summer's Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter ($6.25 million), but above 2005's The Brothers Grimm ($5.2 million). The audience was 55 percent male and 57 percent were 25 years of age or older, and they awarded the movie a "B" CinemaScore (impressive, considering its Rotten Tomatoes score is currently 14 percent).
For the weekend, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters should wind up in first place with between $15 and $17 million.
Last weekend's winner Mama fell to second place with an estimated $3.8 million. That's a 62 percent decline from opening day: while it could be worse (Texas Chainsaw 3D fell 82 percent at the same point earlier this year), that drop is still enough to suggest that Mama is going to follow a pretty standard horror pattern and bleed out quickly. Still, the movie has already earned $39.6 million through eight days, which makes it 2013's highest-grossing movie ahead of Gangster Squad ($36.6 million). Silver Linings Playbook had easily the best hold in the Top 12: the Oscar nominee dipped 22 percent to an estimated $2.34 million for a new total of $61.8 million. Zero Dark Thirty, on the other hand, plummeted 49 percent to $2.33 million for a total of $62.4 million.
Rounding out the Top Five, Jason Statham-Jennifer Lopez action movie Parker debuted to an estimated $2.13 million. That's worse than Statham's last solo outing, Safe ($2.62 million), and is actually his worst start since 2008's The Bank Job ($1.75 million). Distributor FilmDistrict is expecting $6.3 million for the weekend. Parker wasn't as bad as Movie 43, though: the star-studded comedy anthology opened to a truly awful $1.8 million on Friday. That's less than Disaster Movie ($2.02 million), which is the lowest-grossing of the recent spoof movies. For the three-day weekend, Movie 43 should wind up with just over $5 million.
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