Box-office update: Edge of Tomorrow “wins” or “loses” the week depending on how you look at it, and more

Depending on how you look at it, Edge of Tomorrow either “won” or “lost” at the box office this past weekend.

That’s right, you can actually argue that Edge of Tomorrow “won”. Most reports have focused on the fact that the $28.8 million that the film opened to in North America last weekend fell well behind the $48 million that the low-budget romance The Fault in Our Stars opened to, and it even fell a bit behind the $34.3 million that Maleficent earned in its second week. But Edge of Tomorrow actually won the weekend overseas and thus worldwide.

Edge of Tomorrow also didn’t fare too poorly when you compare its North American opening to those of other films starring Tom Cruise or Emily Blunt. Excluding cameos, the only film of Blunt’s that opened bigger (and even then, not by much) was the 2010 remake of The Wolfman, while the opening ranked eighth for Cruise out of the nearly 40 films that he has made, behind three Mission: Impossible movies, two Steven Spielberg movies, Interview with the Vampire and last year’s Oblivion.

In other news…

Heaven Is for Real earned $394,878 in its eighth week, landing it in the #16 spot and raising its domestic total to $88.8 million. It has earned another $2.8 million overseas for a worldwide total of $91.7 million.

God’s Not Dead earned $172,280 in its twelfth week, landing it in the #26 spot and raising its domestic total to just over $60 million. It has earned another $1.6 million overseas for a worldwide total of $61.6 million.

Moms’ Night Out earned $156,759 in its fifth week, landing it in the #27 spot and raising its domestic total to $9.9 million. It has earned an extra $52,112 in Australia but does not appear to have been released in any other countries overseas.

Noah earned $93,834 in its eleventh week, landing it in the #30 spot and raising its domestic total to just over $101 million. It has earned another $244.6 million overseas, for a worldwide total of $345.6 million. That number will get a boost when the film opens in the Philippines tomorrow and in Japan this Friday.

And finally, for the first time since it came out in late February, Son of God does not appear on the weekly box-office chart at all. The film, which had earned $59.7 million in North America and another $8.1 million overseas, came out on DVD last week. If sales figures have been made available anywhere, I have not seen them yet.

Next week another “faith-based” film will join these films somewhere on the box-office chart. Alone Yet Not Alone — which was at the centre of a major controversy when its Oscar nomination for Best Original Song was rescinded earlier this year — is currently scheduled to open in about 200 cities across North America, including five in Canada (Langley, BC; Calgary and Edmonton, AB; Winnipeg, MB; and London, ON).