Bulgarian Box Office Update - Weekend 16-18 March

Explaining the rules of disappointment

Nothing can stop the all mighty John Carter from claiming a second week on the top of the Bulgarians cinemas. The movie has made the excellent BGN 548,971 so far, fast heading towards the 1 million threshold. It at least will come at profit in Bulgaria despite the USD 200m heavy loss it will incur on Disney's financial results.

The Foreigner, the latest Bulgarian title that debuts this month, scores BGN 53,839 for the weekend, which puts in par with Rapid Reaction Corps, which also had a similar start. As for the time being there are no major Bulgarian movies scheduled to be released until May, expect these two to have a well-paved path in front of them.

Proving for yet another time that when a movie is good, it suffers in Bulgaria, 21 Jump Street, the second proposal of the week comes in at BGN 31,791. It's more or less a disappointing figure having in mind that Bulgarians traditionally like such types of movies and the film was released simultaneously with its US premiere. Still many preferred to watch the inferior John Carter rather to go and see a movie embraced by a majority of the (foreign) critics.

The top ten in full:

	movie	Change w/w	Result for the weekend (in BGN)	Total result (in BGN)
1.	John Carter	-51%	131,480	548,971
2.	The Foreigner	new	53,839	53,839
3.	21 Jump Street	new	31,790	31,790
4.	Rapid Reaction Corps	-50%	21,958	222,683
5.	Beauty And The Beast	-57%	21,692	171,977
6.	This Means War	-47%	19,254	368,267
7.	Journey 2	-50%	16,756	478,755
8.	The Descendants	-53%	6,191	27,971
9.	Safe House	-44%	5,770	253,149
10.	Ave	-72%	3,449	23,861

This week the top ten is left by The Artist. The Oscar-winner managed to raise the respectable BGN 54,009 so far. And it is all to be attributed to its big win at the Academy Winners as no one here would have cared to watch it if it wasn't for the Oscar. Ghost Rider 2 is also out and with its BGN 133,082 can be seen as a flop, first because Nic Cage is in principle a star here and second Bulgarians do like such shitty movies. The fact that it wasn't released in 3D however hurt considerably its chances for success. 

Compared to my projections The Foreigner came somewhat higher than my BGN 46,000 forecast, while 21 Jump Street was below my BGN 48,000 expectation.

Next weekend predictions:

Hunger Games (it's excellent) - BGN 75,000
The Lorax (it's mediocre) - BGN 48,000
Mirror Mirror (it's standard Tarsem) - BGN 52,000, including previews

(BGN 1 = USD 0.68/EUR 0.51)