Bring on all the racing puns and innuendos you can find. Speed Racer just didn’t have what it takes to beat IronMan to the finish line.
“Speed Racer” was lapped in its opening weekend at the box office as “Iron Man” continued to fire its jets with $50.5 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday.The anime-inspired race movie edged into the No. 2 spot with $20.2 million, slightly ahead of the 20th Century Fox comedy “What Happens in Vegas,” which debuted at $20 million.
Rarely do movies ever make more than they did on the first weekend in any other following weekend, so the studios are going to be hard pressed to come up with the $120million budget after this $50million opening weekend.
After they get the money from merchandising (my kids are crazy about the cars) and the dvd sales, they might recoup a lot of their costs, but I don’t imagine this will be enough to bring about a sequel.
Yahoo also points out that sites like this one were already bashing the film before it even came out. Oh the power of the intarweb!
Edit: It appears that some of the numbers were skewed to make the agony of defeat not so painful. But keep in mind Yahoo was reporting based on “projected numbers” for Sunday, so that wasn’t in stone. The Production budget may have been underestimated as well.
BoxOffice Mojo puts out final numbers.
Iron Man = $51,190,629
What Happens in Vegas = $20,172,474
Speed Racer = $18,561,337
Thanks for the tip MizH
