Macall Polay/Focus FeaturesThere was nothing wrong with the box office that a little Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Tyler Perry, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Meg Ryan and Annette Bening couldn't fix.
A squadron of star-powered movies helped Hollywood recover from one of its worst weekends in years. And while no one film was all that big, together, they were big enough.
Joel and Ethan Coen's Burn After Reading, featuring Pitt and Clooney, finished first with $19.4 million, per studio estimates compiled today by Exhibitor Relations.
The latest product from the Perry morality-play factory, The Family That Preys, was the hottest ticket of the weekend's wide releases, earning $18 million (second place) on about 500 fewer screens than Burn After Reading.
With the cop drama Righteous Kill (third place), Pacino and De Niro overcame terrible reviews and each man's own spotty box office past to sell $16.5 million worth of tickets.
The Ryan- and Bening-led remake of the comedy classic The Women ($10.1 million, fourth place) fared the worst of the new movies, not because it wasn't Sex and the City, which it wasn't, but because its per-screen average ($3,406) just wasn't very good. Still, its debut gave Hollywood its fourth movie of the weekend to gross at least $10 million.
Which is four more movies than Hollywood had last weekend.
Taking a look inside the weekend numbers:
- Burn After Reading, the Coens' first movie since the Oscar triumph of No Country for Old Men, is the art-house-skewing brothers' biggest-ever debut, besting the $12.6 million posted by the Tom Hanks-led The Ladykillers.
- Perry basically did his thing, but failed to crack $20 million for the first time in three movie launches.
- Righteous Kill was a big step up from Pacino's 108-minute-long 88 Minutes, which bowed with only $7 million in April. For De Niro, the movie marked his best opening weekend in more than three years.
- Before you declare Pacino and De Niro free of box office poison, consider that their movie's gross only covered about a quarter of its reputed $60 million price tag. By comparison, The Women's more modest debut nearly made good on its $16.5 million budget.
- For Ryan, The Women was her biggest bow since the career-altering Proof of Life, which opened with a disappointing $10.2 million in 2000.
- If some will use The Women to argue that, Sex and the City shooting stars aside, women can't sell movies, then others will need to remind that The House Bunny (fifth place, $4.3 million; $42.2 million overall) is doing just fine with Anna Faris' face on bus benches.
- Tropic Thunder (sixth place, $4.2 million) huffed and puffed its way past $100 million overall.
- The Dark Knight ($4 million; $517.7 million overall) is mortal after all. The record-setting blockbuster slipped to seventh place, finishing lower than fourth for the first time in its nine-weekend run.
- While ABBA music is forever, Mamma Mia! ($1.7 million; $139.3 million overall) could make its Top 10 run last "only" two months.
- Pineapple Express ($1.1 million, per Box Office Mojo) departed the Top 10 after five weekends and $86 million.
- Last weekend's default No. 1 movie, Bangkok Dangerous (eighth place, $2.4 million; $12.5 million overall), saw its already meager business dry up by nearly 70 percent.
- A weekend after Alan Ball's True Blood failed to draw big numbers on HBO, the filmmaker's new culture-clash drama, Towelhead, was the biggest little movie at the box office, earning $53,000 at four theaters.
Here's a recap of the top-grossing weekend films based on Friday-Sunday estimates compiled by Exhibitor Relations:
- Burn After Reading, $19.4 million
- Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys, $18 million
- Righteous Kill, $16.5 million
- The Women, $10.1 million
- The House Bunny, $4.3 million
- Tropic Thunder, $4.2 million
- The Dark Knight, $4 million
- Bangkok Dangerous, $2.4 million
- Traitor, $2.1 million
- Death Race, $2 million