The holiday movie season is about to become very busy, so the first weekend of December was looking like a weak sister for awhile now. Still, the beat goes on for “The Blind Side,” which continued its improbable run by landing at #1 in its third week. The hooray-for-institutionalized-racism drama has been surging since a pretty good opening, but it probably owes its success to a wide-open marketplace and the diminishing returns of huge opener “The Twilight Saga: New Moon.” “Blind Side” might stop short of $200 million if the legs drop out in coming weeks, but who knows? Maybe it’ll become first choice for the most backwards of families in the coming weeks, because some people just want to find a docile, somewhat mute but physically intimidating black kid that they can heal with Christianity under their Christmas trees.
Don’t weep for “New Moon,” which is posting some massive week-to-week losses. It dropped 63% this weekend but still runs its total to $256 and change, and while the diehards already went, you’ll bet your ass they’ll see the flagging week seven box office and return to pump up the numbers, since if you’re not Team Edward or Team Jacob, you’re Team GTFO. Debuting at #3 was “Brothers,” which registered a so-so opening. The ads appropriately made it look like a glum-fest, so Lionsgate should be happy with what they got, since no one wants to pay to see Spider-Man mope. Well, ok, at least not without some CGI shit swirling around him. Everything largely fell off this session, but “A Christmas Carol” continues to feel the holiday spirit. The film’s at $115 million but, surprisingly, above the pace of “The Polar Express,” which played for a very long time. Look out below, however, because those 3D screens are going to start going to “Avatar” big time.
“Armored” was a dump in less than 2000 theaters, debuting at #6, but with such a quiet weekend, why couldn’t this be more of a competitor? It’s interesting that Screen Gems was able to market the similarly straight-to-DVD-looking “Obsessed” to huge success earlier this year, but unless Beyonce Knowles and Idris Elba are huge box office draws (not really), we can’t see one project being more glamorous than the other. It may boil down to niche markets split down the middle — we’re in the age of the female-centric blockbuster, with stuff like “Twilight” and the older-skewing “Julie and Julia” being looked at as huge moneymakers driven by female box office. While males remain a larger part of the market, there is a hunger for female-centric tentpoles, even if they aren’t filled with explosions and CGI. While the femme-tentpole is still in its early stages (these formulas are hard to crack when most H’wood execs are men) the female niche film, something like “Obsessed,” “The Time Traveler’s Wife” or even “Precious,” can still eke out a solid gross. The male blockbuster is alive and well, of course, but when’s the last time a testosterone-heavy niche film has crossed over? In recent weeks, we’ve seen boy-centric genre films in “Ninja Assassin” and “Cirque du Freak” flop, while more neutral stuff like “Law Abiding Citizen” and “Couples Retreat” were designed to appeal to men and women and hit big. In other words, if it isn’t a brand name blockbuster, are single guys going to show up? Is “Armored” one of the last of a dying breed? These problems could have been solved if they put Columbus Short on the poster without a shirt.
Speaking of dumps, Miramax put little effort into marketing “Everybody’s Fine,” and the DeNiro holiday greeting card of a movie flopped at #10. Could’ve been the apathetic title – gee, guys, why don’t you just call it “Doin’ OK”? In limited release, “Up In The Air” posted a week-best $77k per screen average on only fifteen screens for a stellar $1.2 million, great news for its further expansion. Not too many showed up for the thousand-screen launch of “Transylmania,” however, the frat horror comedy scaring up $252k, an average of — wait, really? — $250 per screen. That’s basically your grandma and all her friends. Meanwhile, there’s some serious deflating on the indie market as far as “Precious,” which tallied $2.3 million, and might be tapped out pretty soon. Some were forecasting $100 million for the film, but clearly they overestimated the box office appeal of Mo’Nique throwing television sets at babies. The film finishes the weekend out at $36 million, a big victory financially, but under the lofty expectations set so far. With the announcements of award winners in coming weeks, you might see an uptick in interest, but its likely they’ve already fulfilled the market for this film.
Lined up for its coming expansion, “The Princess And The Frog” again did smashing business on its two screens, tallying $372k per, while “The Road” pulled in $760k for the frame, losing almost half its impressive opening weekend. It’s kind of amazing that “The Road” was supposed to go wide, was scaled back to 111 screens and then in it’s second week of release it bumps up to all of 128 screens. Audiences are peeved and it feels like The Weinstein Company are releasing this one half-heartedly.
Meanwhile, “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” pulled in $1.4k per screen, the lowest per-screen average of any film on two thousand screens this week, and there were a lot. More people went to see the stillborn “Planet 51.” Really, what kind of asshole are you for not seeing it?
1. The Blind Side- $20.4 million ($129 mil.)
2. New Moon – $15.7 million ($256 mil.)
3. Brothers- $9.7 million
4. A Christmas Carol- $7.5 million ($115 mil.)
5. Old Dogs- $6.9 million ($34 mil.)
6. Armored- $6.6 million
7. 2012- $6.6 million ($149 mil.)
8. Ninja Assassin- $5 million ($30 mil.)
9. Planet 51- $4.3 million ($34 mil.)
10. Everybody’s Fine- $4 million