Final Weekend Box Office Has “Speed Racer” Finishing 3rd

It looks like Mike was on to something when he asked if Speed Racer would be this year’s first official Flopbuster. We reported late Friday night that the number for Speed Racer weren’t looking good. A lot depended on the Saturday numbers, but they weren’t good either.

The WB went on to embarrass themselves on Sunday by overestimating their box office take by nearly $2M. They were estimating Speed Racer had grossed around $20.5M which put them just over What Happens In Vegas for second place. When the final studio figures came out yesterday, however, Speed Racer fell to third with a take of only $18.5M while What Happens In Vegas finished with $20.1M.

To say that Speed Racer is a colossal disappointment would be the understatement of the year. People have been trying to get this movie made for years. They finally got it made, by a pair of star directors no less, only to see the movie tank in it’s opening weekend. Overseas numbers weren’t nearly as high as the studio had hoped either. To make matters even worse, this weekend will bring The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian as direct competition and that film is already tracking to hit somewhere in the mid-$60 to $70 million range. Speed Racer is definitely going to have a hard time recouping its cost.

A film that’s not going to have a hard time recouping its cost is Iron Man which went on to score another $51.2M over the weekend dropping only 48% from last week (which is good considering how much business it did the first week). The cumulative total for Iron Man has soared to $177.8M already making it the top grossing film of 2008 by surpassing the $150.7M that Horton Hears A Who has collected over the last two months.