The Fault in Our Stars tops weekend box office in a spectacular $48.2 million at North American theaters between Thursday night and Sunday according to New York Times. The 20th Century Fox which produced the film maximized the use of social media to promote the film. Reportedly, Fox relied heavily on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube to encourage their audience to buy the ticket for the film.
"Our campaign was all about igniting the core audience of teen girls and fans of the book with a lot of early engageable content that went viral very fast," Marc Weinstock, Fox's president for domestic marketing said.
New York Times described that 20th Century Fox "spent less than $30 million on marketing, or half of what studios typically spend to introduce a summer film."
The Fault in Our Stars has easily trampled Tom Cruise's action film Edge of Tomorrow at the US box office, BBC News recounted. Reportedly, Cruise's time-shifting movie opened in third place, taking $29.1m, despite a budget of $175m while The Fault in Our Stars made $48.2m, against a smaller budget of $12m, topping the chart.
BBC News reported that "box office analysts Rentrak said the movie's success, alongside the likes of Twilight and The Hunger Games, showed how big-budget, male-orientated movies now struggled against those with a large, predominantly female, teenage audience."
The Fault in Our Stars is an adaptation of John Green's tragic teen romance novel with the same title. The motion picture stars Shailene Woodley who plays as Grace Lancaster who happens to be a cancer patient and Ansel Elgor as Augustus Waters. The Daily Beast describes the flick as a movie "about young love and the audacity of optimism in the face of life's unjustness." The characters try to cram a lifetime of true love into the short amount time left before they die.
