San Andreas ($446,573,000)

Warner Bros. is reporting $53.2M for San Andreas‘ opening weekend at 3,777 locations. The New Line/Village Roadshow co-production drew mostly females at 51%.  Under 25ers who turned up at 30% gave it an A- CinemaScore. Over 25ers who repped 70% of the crowd gave it the same grade. 3D repped 44% of the B.O at 3,200 locales. The older demo of 35-49 gave the Brad Peyton-directed film an A.  San Andreas’ Saturday is in line with what we were seeing last night — a 13% spike over Friday with $20.6M.  A majority of those shelling out for San Andreas showed up for The Rock at 38%, while 34% came out because they adore disaster films.

It’s a great morning overall for Warner Bros. In addition to San Andreas’ super weekend, American Sniper finally crossed the $350M mark at the box office catapulting the Burbank, CA studio to the top of domestic B.O. marketshare for 2015 with approximately $872.4M.

Beaming, Warner Bros. distribution chief Dan Fellman exclaimed, “Dwayne Johnson is a major movie star and he’s really coming into his own at the moment and we just happen to have him at the right time. San Andreas is his biggest opening as a solo star, and the film is from original material.”

Fellman also explained why the disaster pic is a tried-and-true genre at the box office.  Auds never get tired of it, going back to 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure ($84.56M).
“As long as they’re not scheduled back to back”, said Fellman about where the genre lands on the calendar, “What also gets tiring is when you start to do sequels of the same thing. It needs to be fresh, and you have to have the right chemistry in the cast.” San Andreas reps the third time that the Rock has worked with actress Carla Gugino after Faster and Race to Witch Mountain.

Even more amazing about San Andreas this weekend: west coast crowds enjoyed watching themselves being decimated onscreen. Nineteen of the top 20 grossing theaters were in either San Francisco or Los Angeles.  Warner Bros. observes that it over-indexed in these venues by 6%. Premium large format theaters which numbered 390 grossed $5.3M or 10% of the weekend gross. Cinemark XD led the way with 31% of the non-Imax total. RealD 3D hubs racked up $19.1M.

Total ticket sales for all films are clocking in at $134M, which is 20% off last year’s post-Memorial Day frame of $166.4M (we were expecting this). Two sluggish weekends hasn’t killed 2015’s pace ($4.3B) which is still ahead of 2014 by 3.4% according to Rentrak.

Worldwide, Pitch Perfect 2 continues to raise the roof crossing $200M. The chick singing pic stayed bratty in its third frame with $14.8M (-52%), swatting away Tomorrowland from second place.  Disney’s George Clooney amusement theme park feature adaptation spiked 62% on Saturday over Friday thanks to matinees. Pic will fall less than 60% in its second weekend with $13.8M and a 10-day running cume of $63.2M.