On one hand, Fox’s “Alita: Battle Angel,” an effects-laden, dystopian, sci-fi action movie with a bionic heroine, easily topped this weekend’s domestic box office. It exceeded most analysts’ expectations by bringing in about $27.8 million in the lead-up to Presidents Day.
On the other hand, that amount is modest next to the roughly $170 million it took make the movie, produced in part by James Cameron and based on a manga series by Yukito Kishiro. A digitally augmented Rosa Salazar leads a cast that also includes Christoph Waltz and Mahershala Ali.
While it was Robert Rodriguez — best known for the “Sin City” and the “Spy Kids” movies — who directed the film, Cameron’s name has been used heavily in the movie’s marketing, echoing the way Peter Jackson’s was employed to push another expensive sci-fi movie, “Mortal Engines,” in December. (Jackson was a writer and producer of that film, but it was directed by Christian Rivers.)
“Mortal Engines” was one of the biggest flops of 2018, opening to about $7.5 million domestically against a budget of around $100 million. Fox had initially planned to release “Alita: Battle Angel” in December, when it would have gone up against a tangle of holiday crowd-pleasers. The studio’s decision to push the release to February seems to have helped Cameron to avoid, at least, a “Mortal Engines"-like disaster.
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Second place at the box office was Warner Bros.’ “The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part.” This sequel about toy-brick people, voiced by Chris Pratt and Elizabeth Banks, brought in about $21.2 million during its second weekend in theaters according to Comscore, which compiles box office data. (If there’s a lesson to take from the top two movies, it’s that audiences gravitate toward the not-quite-human.)
Warner Bros. also took third place with “Isn’t it Romantic,” a comedy that opened about $14.2 million in ticket sales this weekend. The movie, both a romantic comedy and a commentary on romantic comedies, stars Rebel Wilson and Liam Hemsworth.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.