Weekend Box office: Divergent Dominates

Hollywood has long struggled to come up with original ideas that can draw in an important core of the ticket buying public; the young adults. A trend that has been highly successful as of late has been screen adaptations of popular book series. The Harry Potter, Twilight, and Hunger Games films have been some of the best money makers in recent years and the first weekends box office numbers for Divergent once again prove that strategy to be a wise one.

The new movie is a futuristic science fiction is set in a post-apocalyptic Chicago and is based on the book by Veronica Roth and stars Shailene Woodley, Miles Teller, Theo James, Angel Elgort, Jai Courtney, Mekhi Phifer, Zoe Kravitz, Ray Stevenson, Ben Lamb, Ashley Judd and Kate Winslet. Woodley is well known to the young adult audience. The 22-year-old star of the popular show Secret Life of the American Teenager has already cut her box office chops alongside George Clooney in The Descendants and impressed in her lead role in last year’s teen romance The Spectacular Now. Woodley won the role of Divergent’s heroine Tris Prior.

This past weekend Divergent led all domestic box office sales by earning $56 million dollars. In a month when movie sales are at their lowest, Divergent’s draw made it the second highest opening week for 2014 and ranks among the all time top 15 of March openings. The huge opening numbers make it more likely that the series will continue by adapting other Roth novels in the same series.

The Muppets Most Wanted was the second highest grossing film of the week taking in 16.5 million dollars; a disappointing turn considering that the last film in the Muppets franchise had a nearly 30 million dollar opening week. The Dreamworks Animation release Mr.Peabody and Sherman continued to add to it’ impressive total and was the third highest grossing film of the week.

Source:

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=3804&p=.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_(film)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shailene_Woodley