The Avengers Actually Gave A Boost To John Carter At The Box Office

There is some kind of harmony between The Avengers and John Carter. For example, it's kind of funny that the opening weekend domestic box office numbers for The Avengers, $200 million+, was exactly the total thatJohn Carter ended up losing Disney due to production costs and marketing materials. But now another connection has been made between the two movies as ticket sales of one are raising the profile of the other.

According to THR, this weekend The Avengers helped John Carter go from being ranked number 28 to number 12 at the box office. While this may seem like an impossible feat, particularly given that John Carter was released far too long ago, the answer to the riddle is actually quite a strange one: drive-in movie theaters. The trade says that 150 drive-ins played double features of John Carter and The Avengers and the money taken from those screenings was enough to boost ticket sales numbers of John Carter 1,223% last weekend. It grossed a total of $1.5 million thanks to the added push from Avengers and it's total domestic haul stands at $70.8 million.

We're all familiar with those days where absolutely everything that can go wrong, does go wrong, but this past week it seems Disney is in a period where everything goes perfectly right. It will be interesting to see if these numbers are affected at all in the second weekend, given that Avengers is once again expected to clean up.

Eric Eisenberg
Assistant Managing Editor

Eric Eisenberg is the Assistant Managing Editor at CinemaBlend. After graduating Boston University and earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism, he took a part-time job as a staff writer for CinemaBlend, and after six months was offered the opportunity to move to Los Angeles and take on a newly created West Coast Editor position. Over a decade later, he's continuing to advance his interests and expertise. In addition to conducting filmmaker interviews and contributing to the news and feature content of the site, Eric also oversees the Movie Reviews section, writes the the weekend box office report (published Sundays), and is the site's resident Stephen King expert. He has two King-related columns.