Fault in Our Stars Absolutely Obliterated Its Box Office Competition

The film adaptation of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars made $42 million dollars this weekend, taking down previous champ Malefiecent forcing the weekend’s other big debut from Tom Cruise into third place.

Holy shit. With a budget of only $12 million dollars, it’s officially a hit. Buzzfeed helps put the importance of the film’s success in perspective—this is the first big opening weekend for drama in a long time. As they remind us, this is movie that basically makes you cry every five seconds and you know it going in. (So sorry to those of you who went expecting a “comedy” or something.)

The Fault in Our Stars does fall in the footsteps of a different kind of box office champion, however — the YA novel adaptation, typified in grand fantasies like The Twilight Saga, The Hunger Games, and most recently Divergent. With exactly zero CG-laden action sequences to its name, the debut of TFIOS doesn’t approach the box office highs of those movies, but the film nonetheless came with a passionate built-in fan base of author John Green’s best-selling novel. That fan base was so passionate, in fact, that it dramatically front-loaded the movie’s box office, bringing in $26.1 million, over half of its debut, on Friday and Thursday night (thanks to a $25-a-ticket special screening that included a simulcast Q&A with the film’s stars and filmmakers).

So we should probably expect to see more movies based on hit YA books. Even more proof that there’s nothing wrong with reading whatever the fuck you want. There’s probably little doubt left that Shailene Woodley is a bankable actress. Maybe now she’ll go buy herself some more stuff!

Here’s how the rest of the box office looked this weekend:

The Fault in Our Stars — $48.2 million

Maleficent — $33.5 million

Edge of Tomorrow — $29.1 million

X-Men: Days of Future Past — $14.7 million

A Million Ways to Die in the West — $7.2 million

Image via Facebook.