Audiences haven't forgotten 'Toy Story 3'

By Sarah Sluis

Woody, Buzz, and the gang must be relieved that audiences still haven't returned them to the toy box. In its

second weekend, Toy Story 3 continued to draw in fresh audiences to the tune of $59 million, a 46% drop from the first week. Given its enormously high opening, the Pixar movie's dip should level out by next week. Added box office traffic due to the Fourth of July weekend could even boost the total.

Grown Ups opened to a healthy $41 million, despite its poor reviews. With the combined star power of Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade and Rob Schneider, the comedy

hedged itself against backlash towards any one star (if only Knight and Day, saddled with Tom Cruise, had that luxury). The movie even earned 2% more on Saturday than Friday. The summer-themed film has some flag-raising and holiday-weekend scenes, so if Universal can rotate those images into the promos it might win audiences this coming weekend due to its topicality.

After earning a combined $7.2 million on Wednesday and Thursday, Knight and Day racked up an additional $20.5 million over the weekend. Because the movie comes on the heels of another one of Tom Cruise's underwhelming movies, Valkyrie, he's receiving a lot of the blame for the soft opening. Maybe he has lost his star power.

On the other hand, another madcap action comedy involving a male assassin whose unwitting romantic interest gets dragged into the mess just opened a month ago, and it didn't do that well either. That would be Killers ($15 million debut, $44 million cumulative gross), and no one blamed Katherine Heigl or Ashton Kutcher for the movie's failure. I'm chalking this one up to genre fatigue, because I know I wasn't particularly excited about seeing a startled female star shriek as she's being shot at AGAIN. The whole concept feels tired to me, even if it was done well enough to earn a 53% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

On the specialty front, Oliver Stone's documentary South of the Border opened north of $20,000, an excellent opening figure but reflecting just one screen of business. War documentary Restrepo earned $15,000 per screen on two screens. Cyrus ramped up its release from four to seventeen theatres, adding 65% to its gross. The per-screen average dropped almost two-thirds, from $45,000 to $17,000, but the latter number still puts it in a strong position for further expansion.

Twihards will rejoice when The Twilight Saga: Eclipse opens this Wednesday in advance of the Fourth of July weekend. Going up against returning favorite Toy Story 3, kid-friendly The Last Airbender, a M. Night Shyamalan-directed movie in the vein of Captain Planet, opens on Friday.