The Martian and Sicario open big and wide

Pulling in $55 million this weekend, The Martian has very nearly matched Gravity’s record October opening of $55.8 million set two years ago. The Martian’s $100 million worldwide haul represents 95% of its hard-core sci-fi production cost. Meanwhile, hard-core R-rated Sicario opened wide and jacked its earnings to $25 million worldwide, well on it’s way to paying off a big-bang-for-the-bucks $30 million budget. Both these films have a score of 81 on metacritic. Drilling into those numbers, Sicario has a slightly higher curve of 91% positive reviews to The Martian’s 86% positive. Neither has received any negative reviews at all from any ‘meta’ critic.

The Martian has a solid A from CinemaScore, Sicario got an A-. If you want, you can focus on the fact that 55% of the audience for both films were male; I’ll be over here focusing on the happy fact that 45% of the audience were female. (Put another way: American girls spent $32 million on these two movies and American boys spent $38 million, so I’d like it a lot if we can please stop saying movies are targeted at one gender when both these movies would be box-office failures if only one gender bought tickets.)

Over the past 2 weeks, we’ve had premieres for Black Mass, 99 Homes, The Walk, Sicario, and The Martian. In next the two weeks we’ll get to see Steve Jobs, Legends, Freeheld, Bridge of Spies, Room, Truth and Crimson Peak. Our favorite time of year: steaming hot pumpkin spice Oscar hopeful season.

This post can serve as a place to talk about both The Martian and Sicario under the blanket caution of wall-to-wall SPOILER ALERT.