And here we are again, another January U.S. box office number one parody. This time it’s a spoof on 300, which didn’t take long to get made seen as though that Zack Snyder movie isn’t even one year old yet. MEET THE SPARTANS took an estimated $18.7 million over the weekend and despite not screening for critics, audiences didn’t care and went to see it anyway.

And they history tells us they must have enjoyed it because they just keep coming back for more and more of this stuff.

Stallone’s fourth dabble into the RAMBO character and his first in the series in two decades similarly did not screen for critics but took home a cool $18.1 million, which is $6 million more than ROCKY BALBOA made on it’s opening weekend. RAMBO more popular than ROCKY… did the heavy nostalgic angle keep too many people away from the ring last year?

The other big new entry was the Internet killer-thriller UNTRACEABLE from the director of last year’s pretty fine movie FRACTURE. The film took $11.2 million and had to settle for 5th place at the box office, which after some less than favoruable reviews and absymal box office tracking, was probably better than expected.

As I feared, those fanboys who loaded the theatre to see CLOVERFIELD never did return, and nor did the average joe whole heartedly recommended it to their buddies. The monster movie dropped a hard 68%, leaving it’s running total now on $64.3 million.

With movies hitting on a wide range of people and age groups, the box office is up a massive 32% overall with 7 films in the top making above $10 million. A really incredible feat for historically the slowest movie month of the year.

source - imdb, coming soon