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‘The Great Gatsby’s’ opening weekend gets off to strong start

Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Great Gatsby."
Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Great Gatsby.”
(Matt Hart / Associated Press)
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“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote in “The Great Gatsby,” a melancholy observation on the struggle to transform one’s dreams into future glory.

Against the box-office current facing Baz Luhrmann’s “Great Gatsby” adaptation in its opening weekend in theaters, the bedazzled 3-D drama got off to an auspicious start, hauling in a robust $3.25 million Thursday night in its 10 p.m. debut at approximately 2,500 locations.

Competing against newly minted international blockbuster “Iron Man 3,” which is expected to continue its box-office supremacy in its second week of release this weekend, pre-release tracking estimates indicate that “Gatsby” could open to an impressive $45 million.

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That figure is even more impressive considering it’s one of the few movies targeted at women in a summer season heaving with bombastic fanboy fare featuring gunfights, car chases and alien invasions.

As of Friday morning, “Gatsby” had already outperformed other female-oriented films, such as “Sex and the City” (which hauled in just $2.5 million in its late-show opening night debut) and its 2010 sequel, which took $3 million during the same period.

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“The Great Gatsby” is to expand to 3,535 locations through the weekend before going on to screen at the Cannes Film Festival on May 15 -- a precedent-setting inversion of the festival-premiere-to-theatrical-release model.

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Movie Review: ‘The Great Gatsby’

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chris.lee@latimes.com

Twitter/@__chrislee


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