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APEX Hollywood Shortlist: Focus Steals Top Spot In A Weekend Brimming With Resurrections, Oscar Winners And Long Cons

March 3, 2015  | Written by Tomas Romero

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Focus, Warner Bros.

The Lazurus Effect may have brought Olivia Wilde’s sultry scientist character back from the dead over the weekend, but the resurrection most people were talking about had nothing to do with creepy makeup and reanimated corpses at all. With it’s solid $18.6M debut, Will Smith’s romantic-crime caper Focus (Warner Bros.) proved that the king of the Hollywood box office had returned to claim his throne… Big Willie Style.

Smith is the only actor to have 10 consecutive films gross more than $100M at the domestic box office. Focus not only took the top spot this weekend, but it also proved that co-star Margot Robbie’s star-making turn in the Oscar-nominated The Wolf of Wall Street was no fluke. Igniting sparks on movie screens and bus shelter posters everywhere, the pair should fuel Focus – loosely based on Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 screwball comedy classic Trouble in Paradise – to a nice con-worthy run in theaters for the foreseeable future.

Rising from the dead in fifth place with $10.2M was Relativity Media’s The Lazarus Effect. Starring indie-film darlings Olivia Wilde and Mark Duplass as modern day Dr. Frankenstein’s who take things too far in the lab one night, Lazarus is the first narrative feature from award-winning documentary filmmaker David Gelb (Jiro Dreams of Sushi).

Proving that there was room for more than one racy con-artist romp at the box office, the Spanish-language romantic comedy A La Mala opened in 15th place with a breathy $1.4M. Featuring Gossip Girl: Acapulco star Aislinn Derbez as a temptress for-hire who falls for one of her marks, A La Mala should prove to be another modest hit for Pantelion Films, which bills itself as the first major Latino Hollywood film studio.

And though Oscar winners like Birdman, Whiplash and The Theory of Everything all saw sizeable bumps in attendance over the weekend, the big news-maker was Sony Pictures Classics’ Still Alice, which cracked the top 10 for the first time with $2.6M. Fueled by Julianne Moore’s powerful, Oscar-winning performance, Alice is closing in on the $12M mark and shows no signs of letting up.

For Moore fans looking for, well, more Moore, the actresses’ gritty Hollywood saga, Maps to the Stars (which garnered her a Best Actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May), opened over the weekend as well, with $143K on 66 screens.

Complete Box Office Results – February 27-March 1, 2015