Sunday, January 17, 2010

Weekend Box-Office 2: Jan. 15-17

(Numbers are strictly for Friday-Sunday, excluding the holiday. Provided by Box Office Mojo)

1. Avatar (20th Century Fox) - $41.3 million
2. The Book of Eli (Warner Bros.) - $31.6 million
3. The Lovely Bones (Paramount/Dreamworks) - $17 million
4. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel (Fox) - $11.5 million
5. Sherlock Holmes (Warner Bros.) - $9.8 million
6. The Spy Next Door (Lionsgate) - $9.7 million
7. It's Complicated (Universal) - $7.6 million
8. Leap Year (Universal) - $5.8 million
9. The Blind Side (Warner Bros.) - $5.5 million
10. Up in the Air (Paramount) - $5.4 million


Well Avatar is making a lot of money, blah, blah, blah. It's over $491 million domestically as of today - so now James Cameron can eat. The silly but reverential and stylish apocalyptic action-sermon The Book of Eli opened well for Warner Bros., but after beating Avatar on Friday, it was left in the dust throughout the weekend - should be interesting to see how it holds up.

Surprisingly, The Lovely Bones opened up to modest returns in its long-delayed wide release, considering the film is all-but-dead in terms of buzz and opened in NY and LA ages ago (or so it seems). Still, Paramount screwed this up. This was supposed to be their heavy-hitter (which is why they moved Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island back to February) and it didn't deliver. They're not going to make much off of it - if anything - and it failed to catch on with anybody, really.

The Squeakquel ($192 domestic) and Sherlock Holmes ($180 domestic) contine to hang in there a little, while Lionsgate's vampire-squealer Daybreakers dropped a dramatic 67% this weekend and didn't even crack the top ten - whoops. Things are worse for Youth in Revolt, another blunder for the Weinstein's. Poor guys.

And oh yeah, The Spy Next Door - you know the Jackie Chan babysitter-Billy Ray Cyrus soul-patch action/kids movie - pulled in $9.7 million worth of awful parents whose kids will now misbehave in an attempt to match the hysterics and Spy Kids flourishes of the movie.

2 comments:

  1. Taking your kids to see Spy Next Door is the equivalent of saying to them: "I expect you to amount to very little in the future."

    It's a shame. As for Avatar it seems almost destined to cross the all time grosses of Titanic, but I put little stock into that, and more into the adjusted for inflation stats.

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  2. It really is a bit ridiculous when people are paying $16-$17 a ticket in some instances. It would make for a fascinating comparison if the number of tickets sold was the standard.

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