Box Office: Hannah Montana’s Fast Climb to $34 Million

Posted by John Cairns (jcairns@filmschoolrejects.com) on April 12, 2009

Well, this Easter weekend was billed as a battle between the boys and girls at the box office, as Hannah Montana threatened to take down last weekend’s box office champ Fast and Furious. And the girls won — or more likely, “the” girl won. So many girls went to see Miley Cyrus that she ended up in first place with a haul of $34 million, knocking off the sinking Fast and Furious which dropped to $28 million.

I can’t say I’m surprised, I know there were a lot of people who didn’t expect Hannah Montana to do this well, but I knew this franchise had a lot of die-hard fans. I definitely saw this one coming all week long, what with Fast and Furious slowly but surely sinking at the box office every day since the end of the weekend. This movie dropped 59 percent from last weekend. That’s what you get when a movie over-performs at the box office one week and then comes back for more the next. I actually expect a similar story to play out for Hannah Montana. All the tween-age girls who wanted to go see it will have seen it, and you won’t see them back next weekend. Instead, I suspect many of them will go check out Zac Efron in 17 Again.

All in all I am not surprised with the results of the box office, and I am not surprised to find my tastes in movies out of sync with the boring people of middle America yet again. I know, already — Hannah Montana isn’t aimed at people like myself. I still find her boring as all heck, and I can say the same thing for the High School Musical franchise, too.

It’s not that I don’t like Disney movies — it’s just that these folks over there have been spewing out the same old stuff recently with the same people in them all the time. This is the second Hannah Montana movie in two years, for crying out loud. And people are showing no sign of being fed up, yet. Can’t we have some variety?? I want to see something from Disney that isn’t the same boring stuff all the time — I want to see a return to movies like The Lion King or something like that. Something that indicates a return to the glory days of Disney. But as long as we get figures like $34 million for Hannah Montana. and $42 million for the opening of High School Musical 3, we can only look forward to more of this stuff getting the green light– not only from Disney but from the competing studios, too. In fact, I understand this is the second-highest open for a G-rated live action movie of all time behind High School Musical 3.

I guess this is the inner 12-year-old inside of me complaining, because I wouldn’t have liked this current Disney stuff even if I was 12 years old. I would have preferred stuff with monsters, or even aliens. But that’s just me.

As usual, the “Feast or Famine” trend continued at theaters as the other two new wide releases both ended up on the scrapheap. Observe and Report which only came in at $11 million, much worse than most anyone expected. I guess the appeal of that international sex symbol Seth Rogen only goes so far. Or more likely, people may have assumed this was just a ripoff of that Paul Blart: Mall Cop movie they didn’t like the first time, so they didn’t show up.

Dragonball Evolution only hauled in $4.6 million, and I get the impression some really bad buzz out there for this movie killed it. I read that the tracking for this movie was really bad, and the critics by and large hated it, so that’s the end of that movie.

The final damages:

1. Hannah Montana The Movie $34,000,000
2. Fast and Furious $28,783,000
3. Monsters Vs. Aliens $22,617,000
4. Observe and Report $11,140,000
5. Knowing $6,670,000
6. I Love You, Man $6,412,000
7. The Haunting in Connecticut $5,710,000
8. Dragonball Evolution $4,650,000
9. Adventureland $3,433,000
10. Duplicity $2,997,000

I hope you all had a happy Easter weekend. That’s all for now. See you next week when the Reject Report cranks it up again — until then, don’t bet on the movies.

Read more articles by John Cairns