BOX OFFICE: HULK smashes to $55.5 million & THE HAPPENING is no flop!
Continuing a weird trend this Summer of dueling summer blockbusters which are both finding audiences in the same weekend, both Louis Letterier and M. Night Shyamalan will be happy film-makers this morning when they see the box office returns of their latest films aren't all that shabby at all. With a decent amount of hype, if not quite on the scale of Iron Man - Marvel's angrier hero The Incredible Hulk earned $54.5 million over it's first weekend, which granted is considerably lower than the $62 million before inflation that the Ang Lee 2003 version launched with however the bad memory of that movie lingers still today and because of that this version always had a slightly harder battle.
Of course for a sequel (which is not set in stone despite the character being eyed for an Avengers movie) the movie will have to sustain it's audience as the movie was made for three times the amount of it's opening weekend alone (and that's before added cost of marketing) and ya'll know these blockbusters need to make a significant amount of cash because they are difficult and risky productions to make. But studio's have greenlit sequels to X-Men (opened to $54.5 million in 2000) and Fantastic Four (opened to $56.06 million) so there is a good chance we shall see the Hulk once more. The other big new release of the weekend was of course M. Night's The Happening which despite awful marketing, quite astonishingly it prospered to a $30 million opening. Made for $60 million, the movie if it sustains should be a decent sized hit for 20th Century Fox who took a gamble on M. Night when a lot of other studio's didn't. 1 The Incredible Hulk (2008) $54.5M $54.5M 2 Kung Fu Panda (2008) $34.3M $118M 3 The Happening (2008) $30.5M $30.5M 4 You Don't Mess with the Zohan (2008) $16.4M $68.8M 5 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) $13.5M $275M 6 Sex and the City (2008) $10.2M $120M 7 Iron Man (2008) $5.13M $297M 8 The Strangers (2008) $4.1M $45.4M 9 The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008) $3M $132M 10 What Happens in Vegas... (2008) $1.7M $75.8M source - coming soon