Box Office: 'Paul Blart' Cashes $34 Million Check

Lots of people underestimated Paul Blart: Mall Cop, but more people paid to see it. Remarkably, the new Kevin James comedy that is saddled with a leaky concept and bad reviews didn't just win the weekend box office, it crushed it. The last man standing after Sunday's estimates, Paul Blart beat Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino by over $10 million. Nearly every projection going into the weekend had Blart in the $15 million dollar range, but Box Office Mojo reports a $34 million debut. If you're wondering, that's only $6 million off the pace of the biggest January opening ever, last year's Cloverfield. Damn. That left Eastwood fighting several new releases for second place. On Friday, Clint was in fourth, but Saturday and Sunday helped push him back above My Bloody Valentine and Notorious, a race for third place that might be too close to call until the official numbers are in Monday afternoon. Hotel for Dogs also did well for itself, with a debut that fell just shy of $18 million. All told, the top ten movies earned $160 million this weekend, and technically, there's one more day to go because Monday is a holiday. That's a healthy chunk of change for mid-January. The Top Five:
1 - Paul Blart: Mall Cop - $33.8 million
2 - Gran Torino - $22.2 million
3 - My Bloody Valentine - $21.9 million
4 - Notorious - $21.5 million
5 - Hotel for Dogs - $17.7 million We can begin to write the book on some of the December releases now, and it's not pretty. Here's a number for you: 7,857. That's the number of theaters the studios cut this weekend from their releases of Yes Man, Seven Pounds, Despereaux, The Spirit, Valkyrie, Bedtime Stories, Benjamin Button, and The Day the Earth Stood Still. If we're counting only domestic box office, none of those movies are hits, because with marketing costs and all the rest, they didn't make a significant amount over their budgets, if at all. Looking overseas, you could only make a case for Yes Man, Bedtime Stories, and Earth Stood Still being successful at this point, and the sci-fi remake is the only film of the December lot that doesn't need any help. It's made over $200 million and it cost $80, so with DVD and cable and everything else, it's a money maker. That might help explain why studios make the same kind of movies over and over again. But it's a sad commentary that Valkyrie needed to double its production costs just to market itself so aggressively, and it's only halfway home financially because of it. Button is prohibitively expensive and would need a good run overseas to break even. Seven Pounds might do OK in the international markets, and Despereaux probably won't get a big push in foreign territories, so it might be doomed until the DVD, as well.