The "Magic Mike" sequel was a huge disappointment at the box office opening weekend
The sequel to the surprise 2012 hit, was not as big as analysts thought it would be over the holiday weekend.
The film opened to $11.6 million over the three-day weekend. Over the five-day weekend "Magic Mike XXL" brought in $26.7 million.
2012's "Magic Mike" made $39 million opening weekend on a $7 million budget.
Estimates for "Magic Mike" had it making between $45 million and $48 million over the five-day weekend.
Why didn't it perform as well?
Honestly, the sequel just wasn't as good.
"Magic Mike XXL," starts off on a pretty contrived premise. It gives a flimsy reason to explain the absence of some core characters from the first film in order to put the rest of the original crew back together.
From there, the film just turns into a male-bonding road trip to a stripper convention with multiple pit stops along the way. These act as excuses to show scantily-clad men dancing on women and ripping their shirts off. For some reason Michael Strahan is among those men in his own extended cameo. (Seriously, he gets about five minutes of screen time to himself where he's just doing his thing.)
Naturally, this is all expected from a film that is made to make women weak in the knees. However, it all feels too formulaic.
Some of the stops along the way make sense, others, not so much: a beach (Check), a club (Double check), a mansion overrun with male strippers operated by Jada Pinkett Smith's character (Sure, why not?), a home filled with middle-aged women (Um. What?).
Claudette Barius/Warner Bros.Jada Pinkett runs some sort of male stripper mansion. This is a thing that happens in "Magic Mike XXL."The best parts of the film included Tatum showing off his elaborate dance skills and ab-tastic body (and one scene from Joe Manganiello at a rest stop). The sequel would have benefitted from having him dance the entire film, but we've already seen him in "Step Up."
It looks like bad word of mouth got around about the sequel.
Take a look at the box-office intake per day for "Magic Mike XXL" over the weekend:
Wednesday: $9.3 million
Thursday: $5.7 million
Friday: $6.3 million
Saturday: $2.5 million
Sunday: $2.8 million
The film started out incredibly strong Wednesday before nosediving on Friday and plummeting to under $3 million on both Saturday and Sunday.
Luckily for Warner Bros. the sequel only cost an estimated $14.8 million to produce.
The other big film of the weekend, "Terminator Genisys," didn't have a huge weekend either.
"Jurassic Park" took the weekend once again with an added $30.9 million to add to its over $1.3 billion haul worldwide.