The Grand Budapest Hotel awarded for its consistency

Ralph Fiennes’ Gustave serves up a table topping film.

After continually bringing in reasonable audience numbers and hanging around the top 3, The Grand Budapest Hotel has finally reached the top spot in its fourth week. This is down to the weekend being extremely quiet due to a lack of competition, with this being the only film taking over £1m. This shows a great consistency as it only lost £50k from last week, and if it carries on with these minor decreases in takings it will certainly stay in the top 10 for the foreseeable future.

Consistent is not a word that can be used to describe the adrenaline (and petrol) fuelled Need For Speed after it lost over half of its audience, taking £988k. This film clearly shows a difference between UK and American audiences – in the two weeks since its release it’s managed to clear £3.6m with British audiences but in American it’s still having daily grosses of over $2m. Even with the available audiences being bigger in the US, this shows that an action movie needs to have more behind it than just speed. This could be because it’s in the shadow of the Fast and the Furious Franchise or that the audiences are bored of racing action movies, however if this continues to drop at this rate it could be in 5th place or below in next week’s table.

The three new films that entered the top 10 this week unfortunately didn’t make much of an impact, taking the 6th, 7th and 8th spots; none even managed to take £500k. Gritty prison film Starred Up did the strongest, taking £495k, and isn’t a bad start for rising star Jack O’Connell. We’d put this mainly down to it being a UK production as UK audiences are always drawn to home grown releases. After successful adaptations of Nick Hornby’s novels High Fidelity, About a Boy and An Education, Lionsgate will be disappointed with the terrible showing of A Long Way Down, even with big name actors Pierce Brosnan and Rosamund Pike, it only managed £361k. This could be a slow burner and have an audience pattern similar to The Grand Budapest Hotel but with slightly lower takings.

Coming Next Week

With family films being a big hit with the audiences, big things are expected from the newest in The Muppets franchise, Muppets Most Wanted. After the previous Muppets film took over £2.5m on its opening weekend it certainly has the pedigree to battle for the top spot this time around and Walt Disney will be hoping to continue its success with the seemingly never-ending franchise.

Most likely to challenge The Muppets for the top spot is Captain America: The Winter Soldier. With a big fan base this could be a titanic battle and could be down to the wire on who brings in the biggest audience. Just by looking at the previous opening weekends of the franchises Captain America looks set to come out on top, as Captain America: The First Avenger took £2.9m, £400k over The Muppets.

Another action packed adventure can be found in The Legend of Hercules. Adaptations of Greek mythological tales have always been hit and miss in success, from the wonderful 300 and Troy to the disappointing Clash of the Titans sequel, Wrath of the Titans; it isn’t certain how successful this will be, however it has a chance of making the top 5.

What did you think of any of this weeks films? Who will win the battle for next weeks top spot? Let us know what you think below.

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