Movie Box Office: X-Men Fails To Catch Godzilla Before Maleficent

godzilla-door X-Men Days Of Future Past was supposed to be the MARVEL tent-pole movie that crushed Godzilla at the box office. The way some presented it (and friends like John Furrier forecast it) X-Men was to wipe out Big G.

Well, box office reports from Box Office Mojo shows that X-Men Days Of Future Past lack the mojo to catch Godzilla in the domestic box office tally race before Friday, May 30th, or today – the day the heavily-marketed, special-effects laden, snooze-fest-of-a-film-to-skip except-that-Angelina Jolie’s in it flick called Maleficent is released.

The new thinking is that Maleficent will be the box office king for this first weekend in June 2014. So consider that on three consecutive weekends, we’ve had three blockbusters grab the coin over all other movies: Godzilla, X-Men, and if predictions hold, Maleficent.

It’s always tough being in the middle, be it in a car, or in this case, in a box office earnings contest, but that’s exactly where X-Men finds itself, and why it hasn’t caught Godzilla in domestic earnings, and just may never do so.

Right now, on Friday May 30th, Godzilla has pulled in $162,434,000 domestically versus $124,500,629 for X-Men. X-Men’s daily totals were impressive until Wednesday, when it dropped from its rates of $19 million and then $8 million, to $5 million.

And here’s the problem for X-Men: Godzilla had its first weekend of release all to itself, then was beaten by X-Men the second weekend. But now, X-Men has two blockbusters to contend with in just its second weekend: Godzilla and Maleficent. With that, its numbers are going to drop, and dramatically.

Godzilla can thank Amazing Spider-Man for tanking so fast, and audiences so disappointed, that the path was literally cleared for it to have a huge release. It bested X-Men by about $2 million in its first weekend, and picked up another $30 million in its second weekend, and performed very well in between.

X-Men’s International Numbers Save It

To date, X-Men has cleared $221,917,557 outside of the United States. A tally that, alone, paid for the movie. But take note that X-Men opened in 36 countries that Godzilla doesn’t even play in. With that, Godzilla still did well, earning $166,600,000 to date – a number that, alone, paid for the cost to make that movie.

But the bottom line is that, once again, John Furrier and his friends are wrong and I’m right.

Like the Jaguar commercial says “It’s good to be bad.”

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