The Roommate defeats James Cameron's Sanctum 3D at the US box office. Here's Ron's round-up...
While The Roommate wasn't very good, it was good enough. The $16-million flick rose to the top of a mediocre Super Bowl weekend box office to claim the top spot, with $15.6 million on its opening weekend. It didn't have a 3D gimmick or any real big stars, but it somehow managed to rise above itself and best second-place Sanctum by $6 million.
Sanctum, billed as a 3D extravaganza and playing hard on the name of producer, James Cameron, has ended up being not so good, either. While it did take in $9.2 million, that's a low for the modern 3D action film. That's even less than Piranha 3D (but more than My Soul To Take). Either the bloom has gone off the 3D rose, or Sanctum's muted earth tones and claustrophobia didn't appeal to viewers. Maybe people are just getting smart about 3D conversion and are only interested in seeing movies shot in 3D.
Interestingly, among the holdovers, No Strings Attached and The King's Speech weathered the storms a bit better than most. No Strings Attached dropped a single spot to third from last week's second, picking up $8.4 million, while The King's Speech swaps places with The Green Hornet (fifth place, $6.1 million) and brings in fourth place with 8.31 million bucks. Not a bad performance for either of those flicks, really, especially when compared to last week's top movie.
The Rite debuted at number one last weekend, but finds itself out of the top five for weekend number two. The Rite picked up only $5.565 million this weekend, with business plunging sixty-two percent. Even when you compare that to the weekend's other huge sinking stinker, that's pretty bad.
The Mechanic also dropped out of the top five, from third to seventh, but lost only fifty-three percent of its business in the meantime. It still brought in $5.37 million over the weekend, which means the gap between the performance of the two films is a hair's breadth in box office terms.
Surprisingly, True Grit is still around at the box office. The big holiday release crowds showed up, and apparently they keep coming back. Grit finds itself in eighth place this weekend, thanks to the strength of $4.75 million this weekend. So far, Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon as cowboys have picked up $155 million in the US alone. That's a great haul for the cowboy genre, the Coen brothers, and Jeff Bridges himself. True Grit has turned out to be one of the biggest surprises of the movie year.
The Dilemma, however, has not been much of a surprise. In fact, it's been pretty anticlimactic. While it does have star power behind it, that star power hasn't translated to success. In its fourth week of release, The Dilemma is in ninth place at the box office and has picked up only $3.448 million this weekend (and only about $45 million overall).
Rounding out the top ten this weekend is Black Swan, which took in $3.4 million this weekend, edging it ever closer to that $100 million mark. Right now Black Swan sits at $95.888 million and counting. Odds are it is going to make it by this time next week.
There's a staggering amount of movies coming out next weekend. It's as if they decided that, now that the major sports are over for America, they can safely release movies again. For the young ladies, there's a little panacea for your Bieber fever as Justin Bieber's 3D concert film, Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, gets released just in time for Valentine's Day.
Also coming out is the $100 million comedy man, Adam Sandler, teaming up with box office poison Jennifer Aniston for the vaguely repulsive Just Go With It.
Buena Vista is trying their hand at the computer animation game again, with Gnomeo And Juliet. Will it finally be the first Disney success in the computer age?
Also out (whew!) is period action piece, The Eagle, about Iron Age Britain versus a single Roman legionnaire.
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