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Requiem For A Box-Office Weekend: Memorial Day Ticket Sales Lowest In 18 Years
(Photo via Baywatch/Instagram)
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It was a rough holiday weekend for terrible ocean-themed movies. Memorial Day weekend traditionally nets major ticket sales, but this past weekend saw the lowest box-office numbers since 1999. The fifth installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, opened in theaters over the weekend to disappointing results, with Monday projections estimating a paltry $76.6 million. (That might sound like a windfall, but it's actually the second-lowest debut for a Pirates film, coming in just after the first film in the series, 2003's The Curse of the Black Pearl.)
In news that will come as a major shock to...well, nobody, The Rock's Baywatch adaptation isn't doing great at the box office, either. The critically not-so-acclaimed film, which currently holds a 19% rating on RottenTomatoes, has earned just over $27 million in ticket sales. Baywatch cost $69 million to produce, Entertainment Weekly reports, so the film will need to score some pretty major attention from foreign audiences; here's hoping the international film community is more enthusiastic than the U.S. about watching Zac Efron run on a beach in slow motion.
It's hard to determine precisely what led to this Memorial Day weekend's box-office slump. Maybe more people opted to stay home and catch up on Master of None instead of filling multiplex seats; maybe Baywatch and the fifth Pirates film just don't have what it takes to convince audiences to hand over $14.50 plus the price of popcorn. We'll surely be able to evaluate next Memorial Day, when an inevitable sixth Pirates installment and Baywatch 2: Back To The Beach are battling it out in theaters once again—because when have dismal reviews and weak ticket sales ever stopped Hollywood from making a sequel?
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