Allegiant Movie Has Worst Debut in Franchise History

Allegiant, the third entry in the Shailene Woodley-starring Divergent series, opened this weekend--but it had a tough run compared to the past two movies. Entertainment Weekly reports that the film, based on Veronica Roth's young adult series, made $29.1 million domestically Friday-Sunday, which is around half of what Divergent ($54.6 million) made when it debuted in 2014.

2015's Insurgent took in $52.3 million for its opening.

As EW points out, drop-offs between franchise installments of course are not unprecedented. One recent example was the final Hunger Games movie, which also had the worst opening in franchise history. However, the dip between Catching Fire and Mockingjay was around 23 percent, while Allegiant fell by almost half compared to Insurgent.

This isn't exactly encouraging for the final Divergent movie, Ascendant, which comes out in June 2017. Another element that could be contributing to Allegiant's relatively poor performance is that critics are not exactly loving it.

The weekend's winner, meanwhile, was Disney's animated movie Zootopia, which made $38 million this weekend. It's now been the top US movie for three weeks running.