By Sarah Sluis
As I mentioned on Friday, studios have avoided releasing male-oriented films on Super Bowl Weekend,
wary of the inevitable spike downward on Sunday, when people everywhere huddle around the television to eat guacamole and chicken wings, and/or watch the game. Fox chanced that kidnapping thriller Taken would be able to grab enough viewers Friday and Saturday to make up for a precipitous drop on Sunday. They were right. Taken dropped 69% on Sunday, but still managed to make $24.6 million and finish the weekend at number one.
To put the numbers in perspective, most films drop 25-40% on Sunday (a number in the mid-30's is about average). What Fox must have noticed, though, is that even non-male oriented titles drop on Super Bowl Sunday. New in Town, for example, a female-skewing romantic comedy, dropped 61% on Sunday--only eight percent less than Taken. Clearly, the Super Bowl is not the provenance of males alone, but inspires households to watch together, male and female alike.
Paul Blart: Mall Cop, like Taken, exceeded the studio's box office expectations. The surprise success continued to rally above-average audiences. The film came in at number two again, earning $14 million. Its three-week total of $83 million assures that it will cross the $100 million mark in a few more weeks.
Horror flick The Uninvited debuted at number three to $10.5 million, exceeding the results of fellow wide release opener New in Town, a romantic comedy that posed a challenge to marketers over at Lionsgate, and received a mention in a recent New Yorker article on film marketing. Making a slim $6.7 million, it apparently came in according to the studio's (low) expectations.
Oscar shut-out Gran Torino has received a different kind of award: box-office success. The film has already passed the $100 million mark, and pulled in another $8.6 million this week. Eastwood was honored with the Irving G. Thalberg award fourteen years ago--and, like many of those honored, has continued an outpouring of solid, high-quality work.
Slumdog Millionaire, still buzzing twelve weeks after it opened, expanded its release yet again, earning $7.6 million and bringing its cumulative to $67.2 million. Director Danny Boyle won the DGA award this weekend. The award almost always results in a win for Best Director at the Oscars, so Slumdog, while garnering far fewer nominations than Ben Button, has a stronger chance of winning its categories.
Next week brings deliciously creepy stop-motion Coraline, romcom He's Just Not That Into You, Pink Panther 2, and Push. Summit's Push stars Dakota Fanning, meaning the young actress, who also voices the titular role in Coraline, will have two films debut the same week.
Full studio estimates here.
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