2013 Box Office in Retrospect

Box office reports, not the most exciting thing in the world for most but something I like to be at least somewhat aware of since ultimately the trend of what kind of movies we will see is largely dictated by what has been raking in the money for the studios that produce said movies. What we at Manly Movie are most interested in are the R rated action movies or as I like to say, the movies that matter. Let’s take a gander at some box office receipts from the past year.

The most successful film in this area was Olympus Has Fallen perhaps unexpectedly so but it goes to show you where the audiences want to see Gerard Butler: in a proper R rated action movie. With a budget of $70 million the movie has brought in a total of $161 million at the worldwide box office. A sequel is already in the works but it’ll take a clever script to keep me from rolling my eyes for Mike Banning ending up in yet another spot of bother.

Another pair of successes at the box office was Escape Plan and Riddick. Escape Plan provided us with the much awaited double teaming of Sly Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger as co-leads and it raked in $123 million on its $50 million budget and continues to make more. The long gestating labor of love by Vin Diesel made a solid $98 million nearly tripling the $38 million it was made with.

Jason Statham had middling performances with Parker and Homefront bringing in slightly more money than those films cost to produce so they should be making their profit from the home market income later. The Last Stand met its budget and Bullet to the Head unfortunately ended up with only $22 million on a budget of $55 million.

What might be the biggest disappointment of the year is Die Hard In Name Only 5 that despite its heavy-handed attempt at killing a beloved franchise still managed to make a total of $304 million at the worldwide box office with a $92 million budget. Let’s hope that the powers that be don’t take cues on how to make action movies from this stinker. Perhaps some of the damage was negated already by the much better Die Hard movie released later, that being the aforementioned Olympus Has Fallen.

[Sources: BoxOfficeMojo.com, IMDB]