'Hop' skips and jumps to first place

By Sarah Sluis

Families turned out en masse for Hop, earning the Easter Bunny flick $38.1 million, the highest opening weekend of the year. A number in the high $20 millions was expected, so this opening was leaps and bounds ahead of projections. Critics may have sniffed and grimaced, but the CG/live-action hybrid appears to be a winning genre at the box office, not to mention more economical and quicker to produce than an animation-only movie. Hop opened above CG/live-action mixes G-Force and Beverly Hills Chihuahua, but failed to outperform the holy grail of the medium, Alvin and the Chipmunks. Easter is the last Sunday of April, giving Hop three more weekends to take advantage of its holiday tie-in.

Sci-fi actioner Source Code debuted in second place with $15 million. Similarly sci-fi infused titles The Adjustment Bureau and Limitless both opened at $18 million, so Summit probably had higher hopes for the "Groundhog Day on an exploding train" flick.

Haunted house movie Insidious finished with $13.4 million. With 500 fewer theatres than Source Code, the horror pic actually had a higher per-screen average than the action movie. According to Variety, Insidious cost less than $1 million to produce but had $20 million of marketing behind it. The release is the first for distributor FilmDistrict, which is starting out strong with an unusual budget/marketing ratio.

The PG-13 version of The King's Speech didn't seem to revive the box office. The picture dropped 23% to $1.1 million, the same drop as the previous week. Given the millions The Weinstein Co. spend on new prints and publicity, the re-rated version doesn't seem to be an (instant) success, although the distributor noted that more conservative markets like Salt Lake City, Utah, showed the greatest improvements.

The movers and shakers in the specialty market were Win Win and Jane Eyre. Both films have increased week-over-week since they opened three and four weeks ago, respectively. Jane Eyre went up 27% to $1.2 million, doubling the amount of theatres in its release. Win Win skyrocketed 153% to $1.1 million, increasing the theatres in its release by a factor of six. The Oscar-winning Best Foreign Language Film In a Better World opened to an $8,800 per-screen average. The Danish movie debuted lower than last year's winner, The Secret in Their Eyes.

This Friday 80s comedy remake Arthur will open widest, followed by stoner comedy Your Highness, girl assassin pic Hanna, and Soul Surfer, the tale of a teen surfer who survived a shark attack.

'Hop' poised to jump straight to the top

By Sarah Sluis

Releasing well in advance of the Easter holiday, Hop will spring into 3,577 theatres and shows all signs of landing in first place. Critic Frank Lovece rated it a "Santa Clause 2.6," which is pretty close to the terrible Santa Clause 3. He also bristled at the movie's message of nepotism, since a lazy heir triumphs over the underdog hard worker. The film's mix of live action and CG historically results in a very kid-specific following, with poor reviews having no effect on the great box office (See director Tim Hill's Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties and Alvin and the Chipmunks 1&2). Hop should accrue at least $25 million in its opening weekend.

In retrospect, it's surprising someone didn't turn Groundhog's Day into an action film sooner. In Source Code (2,961 theatres), Jake Gyllenhaal plays an army operative who must relive over and over the final minutes before a terrorist attack explodes a train. The exercise is supposed to give him time to figure out what went wrong, but he also finds time to fall in love with a girl, too. Could love save the day? Critic Maitland McDonagh pronounces the sci-fi actioner a "good ride" that's "slick, shiny, sweetly gratifying and clever enough that you don't have to feel dumb for enjoying it." Adult fare has been lacking in recent weeks, so Source Code should do well, perhaps in the high teen millions.

An F-word free The King's Speech will make its PG-13 debut in 1,011 theatres. Will the change in rating make much of a difference? I haven't seen any ads proclaiming the movie's toned-down rating, but maybe I'm just the wrong audience. Currently, the Oscar-winning drama is hovering just outside of the top ten, so the rating change and added marketing could be enough to launch it back onto the box-office radar screen.

A back-to-basics haunted-house movie, Insidious (2,408 theatres) comes from Saw creators James Wan and Leigh Whannell. Their "trust in human emotion" and focus on "two ordinary parents [taking] their stand against God only knows to save their child" pays off, according to McDonagh. Though it's not a perfect example of the haunted-house film, she gives the duo credit for "keeping the atmosphere thick with menace as long as they do."

The Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, In a Better World, will open in 4 theatres. The drama juxtaposes violence among Danish schoolboys with violence in Kenya, which critic Erica Abeel sums up as "a deeply involving film unafraid of raw, visceral emotion, a film that for once thinks almost too big."

On Monday, we'll measure Hop's leaps and see how close Source Code followed. Insidious may surprise, given horror films' strong opening weekends, and it will also be the first test for newbie distributor FilmDistrict. Perhaps the biggest surprise will be The King's Speech, which has already grossed $138 million with its R rating. Are there any more viewers out there?