Los Angeles. Being number one is always good, and better than being number two or ending up even lower. But sometimes is not good enough. Ask Disney, that produced Tomorrowland. And Brad Bird who directed the sci-fi adventure, and George Clooney who had the lead role in it. Also starring Britt Robertson, Raffey Cassidy and Hugh Laurie the film takes us to a world, which very much resembles the utopias dreamed by Walt Disney himself, back in the 1960s. Tomorrowland ended the four day weekend just below $42 million. Enough for the top prize, but these are awful numbers for a Memorial Day weekend debut. The reviews were mostly bad and Disney’s scant hopes of redemption rests in the fact that the picture is going to be the only PG title in the U.S. until Pixar’s Inside Out opens on June 19.
 
Abroad things were not much better and down the line even more worrisome: just $26.7 million in 65 markets. China is about to open, and Clooney was diligently in Shanghai promoting the film. But the fear is that even the combination of Clooney and China’s exploding box office may not produce miracles. With a production cost of about $180 million dollars, Disney’s executives have no reason to celebrate but at the same time they are not going to need anti-depressants thanks to Avengers: Age of Ultron, that opened in China by producing over $156 million in just six days. Add that in the U.S. it went over the $400 million mark, a global total that now stands close to $1.3 billion, and the $1.5 billion generated by the first Avengers now seems very much within reach.
 
Until very recently the $1.5 billion club was an extremely rarefied one. Besides Avengers, there was only James Cameron, with both Titanic and Avatar. Now the Avengers’ films are going to be a couple, And this week the club has been officially joined by Furious 7, which in China alone generated $390.9 million. Back to the U.S. market. Universal has good reason to be proud of Pitch Perfect 2: the four Memorial weekend days were good for an extra $38 million. The pic easily crossed the $125 million mark on Monday; while overseas the musical comedy opened at number one in Spain and in Norway and held on to the top spot the UK, in Germany and South Africa, for a global haul of over $190 million. Fueled by excellent reviews and word of mouth, Mad Max: Fury Road also continues to perform well. George Miller’s post-apocalyptic sequel added $32 million in the U.S., for a total of close to $100 million. Abroad it stayed as number one in Korea, France and Russia, in Brazil and in Miller’s own Australia, where it has reached a total of over $10 million, for a worldwide cumulative – so far – of over $210 million.
  
At number five, domestically, we find Fox’s horror remake Poltergeist, which in four days generated $26.5 million, with 60% of that amount coming from an under-25 audience. The remake of the 1982 haunted house cult classic starring Sam Rockwell, Rosemarie DeWitt, Jared Harris and Jane Adams also did well overseas by collecting $8.3 million from 35 markets. Fox can also feel positive about the spy comedy Spy. Starring Melissa McCarthy and Jude Law, the U.S. opening is scheduled for June 5. But in the meantime the film opened in 10 select Asian markets, where it produced a decent $12.5 million.
 
That’s all for this weekend. Next week we will witness a match between Bradley Cooper starring in Cameron Crowe’s Aloha! (with Emma Stone and Rachel McAdams) and Dwayne Johnson’s San Andreas. True, size does not necessarily matter, but in this forecast The Rock is still the favorite.
Lorenzo Soria