After opening strong internationally last week, ‘Rio’ finally made its way to its country of origin (the movie was produced by Greenwich, CT-based Blue Sky Studios) and kicked similar amounts of ass. Never mind that it’s overlong, busy, emotionally detached and just plain not very good. As long as the kids get to wear some silly glasses and dance along to the Black Eyed Peas with an obese tropical bird, everyone’s happy.
At #1 with $40 million, ‘Rio‘ is a genuine hit. Along with its domestic haul, the movie has made an estimated $168 million globally. Not too shabby. It would just be nice for a quality family movie to take this kind of booty. Fortunately, ‘Rango’ also did pretty well, despite lacking the marketing and tie-in associations that ‘Rio’ has. Oh ‘Rango’. So good.
What’s funny about the #2 film is how wildly the estimates fluctuated with regard to how much money it would actually take in. On Friday, it looked like the movie was over-performing, with a total weekend gross that might eclipse $30 million. Then things got more conservative, and estimates dropped to the low-to-mid $20 million range. ‘Scream 4‘ finally ended up with less than $20 million. It grossed a meager $19.2 million. This is not good, especially since the movie was the most expensive to produce in the series. It cost $40 million, and that’s before you factor in those last minute re-shoots. It was expected to launch a new trilogy. As a cap to the franchise, though, ‘Scream 4’ might work better. But I know that the Weinsteins must be disappointed by this turn of events. I’m betting this will be the last ‘Scream’ we see until the inevitable remake in a few years.
The other major new release this week was ‘The Conspirator‘, the Lincoln assassination drama from Robert Redford. It looks about as exciting as watching paint dry, and audiences seemed to agree. It made only $3.9 million, enough to clock in at the #9 spot. All kidding aside, it was only in 707 theaters and had a strong $5,550 per-screen average, so apparently old people got out of the house to see this thing. But me? I stayed in.
It was nice to see that ‘Hanna‘ held pretty strong, dropping just 41%. Also, at the time I wrote last week’s box office report, it looked like ‘Hanna’ debuted at #3. However, by the end of the tally, it had bested ‘Arthur’ for the #2 spot. That’s awesome. ‘Hanna’ is a modern action movie masterpiece and ‘Arthur’ looks like something you fall asleep to on a cross-country flight.
Also, please sound off if you saw ‘Soul Surfer‘. How is this thing making so much money?
The Top 10:
01 ‘Rio’ (Fox) – $40 million
02 ‘Scream 4’ (Weinstein Company) – $19.2 million
03 ‘Hop’ (Universal) – $11.1 million
04 ‘Soul Surfer’ (Sony) – $7.4 million
05 ‘Hanna’ (Focus) – $7.3 million
06 ‘Arthur’ (Warner Bros) – $6.9 million
07 ‘Insidious’ (FilmDistrict) – $6.8 million
08 ‘Source Code’ (Summit) – $6.3 million
09 ‘The Conspirator’ (Roadside) – $3.9 million
10 ‘Your Highness’ (Universal) – $3.8 million
Shannon Nutt
Don’t know if the returns on SCREAM 4 should be viewed as positive or negative. I know I’d sure see a lot more horror movies if they were made as smartly and with as much restraint (I liked the fact that the Scream movies are about being scared, NOT about showing excessive gore) as this series…then again, the premise DID seem very tired the fourth time around (and it was easy to guess the killer if you went in with knowlege of the first three movies).