Weekend Box Office: MR. PEABODY & SHERMAN Takes the Checkered Flag, 300 Sequel Rises to Second, While NEED FOR SPEED Stalls in Third

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Weekend Box Office: Family-Friendly MR. PEABODY & SHERMAN Takes the Checkered Flag, 300 Sequel Falls to Second, While NEED FOR SPEED Stalls in Third

By Dave Trumbore

Published Mar 16, 2014

Weekend Box Office: Family-Friendly MR. PEABODY & SHERMAN Takes the Checkered Flag, 300 Sequel Rises to Second, While NEED FOR SPEED Stalls in Third

A trio of new debuts were no match for Mr. Peabody & Sherman, the family-friendly adventure feature from DreamWorks Animation. The animated duo took the top spot from 300: Rise of an Empire, making it one of only two films to actually move up in the top ten rankings. The other film? Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, which debuted huge last week in only a few theaters, and moved up to eighth during its first weekend of wide release.

The weekend was a disappointing one both critically and financially for Scott Waugh's street-racing adaptation, Need for Speed. Perhaps the action-driven Non-Stop, which landed in fourth place, proved too much box office competition on an otherwise unexciting weekend of non-new releases. Fandom-driven films Tyler Perry's The Single Moms Club and the Kickstarted Veronica Mars movie turned in fifth and tenth debut spots respectively.

	Title	Weekend	Total
1.	Mr. Peabody & Sherman	$21,200,000	$63.2
2.	300: Rise of an Empire	$19,105,000	$78.3
3.	Need for Speed	$17,808,000	$17.8
4.	Non-Stop	$10,615,000	$68.8
5.	Tyler Perry's The Single Moms Club	$8,300,000	$8.3
6.	The LEGO Movie	$7,705,000	$236.9
7.	Son of God	$5,400,000	$50.9
8.	The Grand Budapest Hotel	$3,640,000	$4.8
9.	Frozen	$2,117,000	$396.4
10.	Veronica Mars	$2,021,000	$2.0

Hit the jump for more.

With the exception of The Grand Budapest Hotel, this weekend was full of fairly sizeable box office ticket sales drop-offs. The 300 sequel took a big hit, dropping over 57% from its first-place debut opening weekend, even after adding 20 theaters. Mr. Peabody & Sherman also took a hit of 34%, but added 17 theaters, which was enough to secure the top spot with weak weekend competition. The other animated features in the top ten, The LEGO Movie and Frozen, are still battling it out to see which film has the most endurance. Repeat viewings are clearly still pleasing audiences as the Phil Lord and Chris Miller effort has been going strong for well over a month, while Disney's 2013 billion-dollar-earning feature from Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee is enjoying its 17th week on the charts!

Need for Speed, meanwhile, already shows signs of running out of gas in its first week. Perhaps it will find an audience looking to get their fix of high-octane excitement over the coming weeks. Next week sees the debut of Neil Burger's Divergent, which is an action film of a different sort (and a curious litmus test for the state of YA adaptations). James Bobin's Muppets Most Wanted also drops next week, so it will be interesting to see if that sequel knocks the other friendly-family fare further down the lists.

All box office data comes courtesy of Box Office Mojo.