Weekend Box Office final tally: Game of Thrones edition
The final box office numbers are in, and according to BoxOffice Mojo, Game of Thrones scored an impressive $1.5 million opening weekend for it’s single week run. Opening in just 205 IMAX theaters, that’s an average haul of $7,322 per theater. That is the second best average per theater this weekend by miles. The only movie that beat Game of Thrones was American Sniper, which was number one overall with an $8,198 average and $31.8 million total.
But Sniper has been out since 2014, and in wide release for nearly a month, and is chugging towards the Oscars. In comparison to other movies that opened this weekend along side the show’s mini release, Game of Thrones blew away the competition. Project Almanac, Black or White and The Loft all opened much wider than Game of Thrones, and all came back with much lower returns of $1,500-$3,500 per theater.
Read more, after the jump….
Though Game of Thrones landed outside the coveted “Top Ten Movies” winner’s circle, landing only at number 15, this will probably still be regarded as a huge success. After all, “The Watchers on The Wall/The Children,” as the first television show to be screened in IMAX theaters, was not a movie, and almost no effort was made to turn it into one. What struck me the most this weekend when I saw it was that no effort was made to make it accessible to anyone who was not already watching the show, and probably had already watched and rewatched these episodes several times. Even the “Previously on Game of Thrones” wasn’t updated to help include information that might have helped a newbie along. The show simply upgraded the film to work for IMAX, and then ran it. And it still had the second highest average theater sales of the weekend.
This success suggests that IMAX will most likely be interested in doing projects like this in the future. And though Season 5 is already in the can, so upgrading it to do this next year will take extra time, the show is in a good position to prep ahead for Season 6 (and probably 7) if IMAX was so inclined to keep doing this.
Who knows? Perhaps if this continues to work every year, HBO might just come around to that “Big Movie Ending” George R.R. Martin has been pushing for in the last year or so.
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