STUDIOS HAVE LITTLE TO BE THANKFUL FOR FROM FRIDAY’S BOX OFFICE

The box office for New Line’s Horrible Bosses 2 is turning out to be about as horrible as the movie’s reviews. On Friday it earned only about $6.1 million, while The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 was gobbling up $24.1 million. The day after Turkey Day also saw DreamWorks Animation’s Penguins of Madagascar place second with $10.5 million, an amount that was at the low end of expectations. For that matter, Mockingjay also failed to live up to many analysts’ predictions. Last year’s Catching Fire, which also opened over the Thanksgiving holiday, earned $31.5 million on Friday. In fact, all three follow-ups fell short of the box office for the originals. Part of the blame for the less-than-record-breaking results can be assigned to the critics, some of whom wrote devastating columns about Bosses. Peter Howell in the Toronto Star, for example, called it “This wretched excuse for a comedy,” adding that the filmmakers have gone “out of their way to up the profanity, vulgarity and absurdity of the first film, falling into the classic sequel trap of attempting to dirty-up and double-down on every laugh.” Or consider the opening paragraph of Kyle Smith’s review in the New York Post: “Duct tape, thick rope and the threat of being shot all figure prominently in Horrible Bosses 2. All would have been required to keep me in my seat if it weren’t my job to report back on this factory-issued sequel.” The New York Times‘s Stephen Holden refers to it as “the Hollywood equivalent of a rambunctious little boy pointing to the toilet and squealing, ‘Mommy, look what I made!’” To be fair, the movie did receive a handful of positive reviews. Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post concludes her review by remarking, “Taste may be stridently abandoned in what looks to be a thriving if not entirely healthy Horrible Bosses franchise. The myriad joys, embarrassments and self-satisfactions of unapologetic bro-hood, however, are not.”