Sabotage Is Taking A Beating At The Box Office

We need to talk about Sabotage’s opening weekend.  It’s not good.

The cumulative total for the U.S. market for the movie for it’s opening weekend has been 5.2 million.  This is a very weak showing, especially when you consider how much promotion this movie had. Schwarzenegger was all over the place, online and offline.  This is even worse than The Last Stand opening which was over 6 million.  TKR may have been right last November when he forecast a bomb.  But I guess given the recent performance of Arnold that may have been easy to see.

The budget for the movie was 35 million, and since it isn’t out internationally yet — some countries are only releasing it DTV too, it will probably yet break even.

But the bigger story here is that Arnold Schwarzenegger is not the draw he once was, at all.  Is it really an age issue?  Possibly but Liam Neeson is a box office steam train by comparison and that guy is no spring chicken.  This movie would probably have performed even worse had it been released in 2015 which is jam packed with block buster features.

So right now Schwarzenegger is on the ropes.  His next appearance is The Expendables 3, although another extended cameo, so the performance of that movie (it’ll sell big, trust us) won’t really be an indicator of anything for him.  Now it seems that more is riding on Terminator: Genesis than ever and I don’t like the sound of that.  It seems every bit of news about the movie is worse than the last.

But I would say don’t count Arnie out just yet.