Sunday
05Oct2008
Box Office - 'Chihuahua' Runs With the Big Dogs
Sunday, October 5, 2008 at 11:40AM
I could throw out any number of dog-related puns to
describe the weekend box office numbers, but we're both better than that, aren't
we? Instead, we'll just tip our hat to Disney for doing what they do best:
Create a family-friendly comedy that does great business in its first week at
the box office.
2 - Eagle Eye ($17.7 million)
3 - Nick and Norah ($12 million)
4 - Nights in Rodanthe ($7.3 million)
5 - Appaloosa ($5 million)
The new releases were kind of all over the road; Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist finished in third place, just a little bit below its projected total. A handful of limited releases piled up at the bottom of the top ten, with An American Carol, Religulous, Flash of Genius, and Blindness running ninth - twelfth. Of these, only Religulous could be deemed a success, because it opened in just 500 theaters.
Appaloosa, the Ed Harris western, is not technically a new release, but this is its first weekend in more than a dozen theaters, and audiences helped it move from 37th place to fifth place in one week. You wonder when seeing a movie expand like this if it will ever show up in 2,000 theaters or 2,500, which would help it be more competitive. The movie deserves it, so hopefully, New Line will push it a little harder towards the end of the month.
There will be time, I imagine, to discuss what an absolute failure How to Lose Friends and Alienate People is, but we'll wait to detail the whole mess. Instead, just know that it made $1.4 million. Of the top 20 films this weekend, only Igor had a lower per-screen average.
Using the 30% estimate (a movie's opening weekend accounting for roughly a third of its total box office), How to Lose Friends is setting up for a whopping $4.2 million. I would suspect it won't quite get that far; a debut performance like this gets you pulled out of theaters rather quickly.
The Top Five: 1 - Beverly Hills Chihuahua ($29 million)
2 - Eagle Eye ($17.7 million)
3 - Nick and Norah ($12 million)
4 - Nights in Rodanthe ($7.3 million)
5 - Appaloosa ($5 million)
Reader Comments (3)
It's striking that theres no mention of "An American Carol." outside of this paragraph. Did you even screen a copy of the movie? I'm so utterly sick of this liberal biased mentality that seems to permeate throughout mainstream liberals in hollywood that you would dismiss a funny movie because it doesn't agree with your point of view. Can I say "McCarthy-ISM"... Glad you're not on the radio any longer to spread your idiocracy..
... but it didn't look funny.
Hey Michael Moron -
They didn't give press a chance to watch American Carol. Incidentally, it received as much mention in this article as Blindness and Flash of Genius. The reason Religulous got an extra sentence - since, I guess, we're keeping score - is because its per screen average was undeniably the biggest among that group.
And I didn't dismiss anything. Here's a correspondence between me and a studio representative last month:
Subject: AN AMERICAN CAROL phoner ops- Colin
Hey Colin-
I wanted to talk to you about a political, comedy coming to PHX on 10/3 called, AN AMERICAN CAROL.
The film has an all star cast including, Kevin Farley (Chris Farley’s brother), Leslie Nielsen, Jon Voight, James Woods, Dennis Hopper, Trace Adkins and Kelsey Gramer.
Would you want to talk to any of them? Kelsy is the most limited and Director, David Zucker is the most available! No screenings……
Thoughts?
Subject: Re: AN AMERICAN CAROL phoner ops- Colin
Yeah, I would be interested. It's kind of a hot-button movie at the moment. I'd probably go:
Grammer
Zucker
Hopper
Nielsen
Farley
Voight
Woods
So blame the studio. They never let me see the film and never followed up on their offer for interviews. I would've talked about it if there had been something to talk about. Just because a movie exists that agrees with your politics doesn't make it newsworthy in a box office recap. If its numbers had been stronger, it would've received more attention. Last week, for example, I spent a whole paragraph on Fireproof, another not-so-liberal movie that didn't screen for the press. Here's what I said:
"The weekend's big shocker was the performance of Fireproof, the religious-themed firefighter drama starring Kirk Cameron. We talked about the economics of Eagle Eye earlier; this film cost half a million and made 12 times that amount in three days, good enough for a fourth-place finish. It's an extremely impressive opening, and in my opinion, it's the real winner this weekend."
As for the charge of McCarthyism, you clearly have no understanding of what that was all about, since you're lumping my limited coverage of An American Carol in with it, but since you're trying so hard to invent a bias where there isn't one, I can understand the knee-jerk reaction.