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.

'Knight and Day' and 'Grown Ups' aim for teen and adult crowds

By Sarah Sluis

Adults and teens will be greeted with two summer movie staples this weekend: a big-name comedy, Grown Ups, and a slick action comedy, Knight and Day. But don't expect either of them to beat the second weekend of Toy Story 3, which should earn well over $50 million.

Pairing up Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, Knight and Day (3,098 theatres) jump-started the weekend by opening on Wednesday, bringing in $3.8 million on opening day. However, Toy Story 3 brought in $13.4 million the same day, a sign that the movie will be trounced at the box office. Critic Kevin Lally summed up the movie "as disposable and inconsequential as summer entertainments get," but for audiences dividing their attention between the film and their giant buckets of popcorn, they might get exactly what they wished for.

Grown Ups (3,534 theatres) is a movie cast with extremely funny people that isn't really funny at all--unless you're the kind of person who thinks that

bodily fluids are so hilarious you squirt milk out your nose in laughter. I'm talking to you, fourth-grade lunchroom table. The movie is an exercise in mediocrity, and at best numbs you for a couple of hours. Apparently, the cast had fun making the movie, but as this slideshow from New York Magazine suggests, the more fun you have during shooting, the less fun the audience usually has watching the final product.

A moving war documentary that's also a selection at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Restrepo follows a group of soldiers stationed in the most dangerous part of Afghanistan. Without drawing

conclusions about its participants, it offers a reminder of "one of the irreducible, grim absurdities of this war, which is the disjunction between its lofty strategic and ideological imperatives and the dusty, frustrating reality on the ground," as New York Times critic A.O. Scott points out. I wrote about the movie on this blog earlier this week, and give it my thumbs up.

On Monday, we'll weigh in on the second-week drop of Toy Story 3, wonder if it's the end for Tom Cruise with Knight and Day, and see how many audiences fell for stupid-funny Grown Ups.