3-D: It Makes Our Eyes Feel Like Two Friends on a Camping Trip
The Weekend Box-Office Round-Up /
William Goss
Box Office Round-Ups | September 8, 2009 | Comments (33)
For the longest while, Sandra Bullock stalker pic All About Steve was scheduled to open the first week of March, as counter-programming to the epic, violent and male-skewing likes of Watchmen, but Fox decided to bump it back a couple of weeks prior in favor of a TBD fall slot. Cut to this fall, and it would seem that the summertime successes of both Bullock (The Proposal) and co-star Bradley Cooper (The Hangover) would make an even bigger hit out of Steve yet. Cut to this weekend, and the smart move for one dumb movie garnered about $13.9 million over the four-day weekend and a third-place finish behind week two of The Final Destination (number one, with $15.4 million) and week three of Inglourious Basterds (number three, with $15 million, making it a likely candidate to overtake Pulp Fiction as Quentin Tarantino’s biggest box office grosser to date).
Opening this week in fourth place was Gerard Butler action outing Gamer, whose $11.2 million will just barely make it the biggest opening weekend that Crank helmers Neveldine/Taylor have had yet. District 9 brought in a $9 million weekend in fifth place; more importantly, it passed the $100 million mark, and has probably been the cheapest film to do so in a good while (who would’ve predicted that would best a Christian Bale/Johnny Depp gangster flick when the summer started?). Halloween II tumbled to sixth place with $7 million, while Julie & Julia stuck around in seventh place with an identical amount. If only Rob Zombie’s extreme re-imagining had consisted of a knife-wielding Julia Child terrorizing Haddonfield …
G.I. Joe ranked eighth with $6.7 million, The Time Traveler’s Wife claimed ninth place with $5.4 million, and poor Mike Judge saw his widely-opened Extract just barely crack the top ten with $5.3 million. Granted, it only opened on 1,600 screens (as compared to the 2,200 to Steve’s name, or the 3,300 that Basterds has held onto), but so did Office Space over a decade back to similar numbers, while his Idiocracy was all but dumped in ten towns on this weekend three years ago. Let’s hope that he doesn’t hold off for another decade while the Extract love builds up on DVD; I simply don’t see that panning out for the best.
Comments
Posted by: io at September 7, 2009 8:27 PM
What a bland movie week. (With the exception of Extract).