Box Office - 'Meatballs' Wins Again with $24 Million

A very strong second weekend for Cloudy With a a Chance of Meatballs, which only tailed off 19% from last weekend to easily win the box office derby with $24.6 million. That gives the Sony animated film should cross its $100 million budget number in a couple more weeks, and with the foreign markets opening soon, it should be easy to wind up in the money here. There are different results ahead for two of the other new releases this weekend. Surrogates opened soft with $15 million, so if you use the rule of thumb that most movies make one-third of their total box office in the opening frame, this will barely make back half of its budget. Pandorum will do even worse; with a $40 million price tag, the new sci-fi flick earned about 1/8th of that amount in its debut, placing sixth on the weekend rundown with under $5 million. The news is slightly better for Fame, but only because it had a very modest $25 million budget. So $10 million this weekend, which is less than we projected and doesn't bode well for the future - especially for an MGM $4 billion in debt - but it's not as rocky a start as it was for Surrogates and Pandorum. And while it's nowhere near the top ten at the box office, the new horror film Paranormal Activity took in about $150,000 on 12 screens. That's about ten times what the film cost, and there hasn't been much in the way of advertising, either, so realistically, here's your biggest hit of the weekend. The Top Five:
1 - Chance of Meatballs ($24.5 million)
2 - Surrogates ($15 million)
3 - Fame ($10 million)
4 - The Informant! ($6.9 million)
5 - I Can Do Bad All By Myself ($4.7 million)